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COPM^IGHT DEPOSIT. 




THE AUTHOR. 



THROUGH 
SCANDINAVIA 

TO 

MOSCOW 

WITH 

MANY ILLUSTRATIONS 

AND MAPS 



By 

WILLIAM SEYMOUR EDWARDS 

It 

Author of 
«IN TO THE YUKON," ETC. 



cincinnati 

The Robert Clarke Co. 

1906 



COPYRIGHT i906. By 

WILLIAM SEYMOUR EDWARDS 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Tv/o Copies Received 

OCT 13 1906 

Copyright Entry 

CLASS <3_ XKc, No. 

COPY B. 



I J q<3^' 



'■:i b 



Vs'^'' 



DEDICATION 

To my life-long chum, 

my father, 

these pages are affectionately dedicated. 



FOREWORD 



These pages are made np of letters written dur- 
ing a little journey through Scandinavia and into 
Eussia as far as Moscow, some four years^ ago, be- 
fore the smashing of the Russians by the Japanese. 
Tiiey were written to my father, and are necessarily 
intimat^ letters, in which I have jotted down what I 
saw and felt as the moment moved me. The truth is, 
I was on my honey-moon trip, and the world sang 
merrily to me — even in sombre Eussia. 

Afterward, some of these letters were published 
here and there; now they are put together into this 
little book. I had my kodak with me and have thus 
been able to add to the text some of the scenes my 
lens made note of. 

It was my endeavor at the time, that the kindly 
circle who read the letters should see as I saw, feel 
as I felt, and apprehend as I apprehended ; that they 
should share with me the delight of travel through 
serene and industrious Denmark, among the grand 
and stupendous fjelds and fjords of romantic Nor- 
way; should visit with me a moment the Capital of 
once militant Sweden, and join me in the excitement 
of a plunge into semi-barbarous Russia. The transition 
from Scandinavia to Russia was sharp. I went from 
lands where the modern spirit finds full expression, 
as seen in the splendid schools and libraries of Den- 
mark, in the democratic and Americanized atmosphere 
of Norway, in the scientific and mechanical progress- 

vii 



Vlll FOREWORD. 

iveness of Sweden. Entering Russia, I found my- 
self amidst social and political conditions, mediaeval 
and malevolent. The wanton luxury of the enor- 
mously rich, the pinching poverty of the very poor, 
the political and social exaltation of the very few, 
the ruthless suppression of the many, here stared me 
in the face on every hand. The smoldering embers of 
discontent, profound discontent, were even then ap- 
parent. In the brief interval which has since elapsed, 
this smoldering discontent has become the blazing con- 
flagration of Revolution. Driven against his will 
by inexorable fate, the Czar has at first convoked 
the Imperial Douma and then, terrified by its grow- 
ing aggressiveness, has summarily decreed its death. 
Panic-struck by the apparition of popular liberty, 
which his own act has called forth, he is now in 
sinister retreat toward despotic reaction; the con- 
sternation of the unwilling Bureaucracy, day by day 
increases; terror, abject terror, increasingly haunts 
the splendid palaces of the Autocracy; and the 
inevitable and irrepressible movement of the Rus- 
sian people toward liberty and modern order is 
begun. 

The symptoms of social and political ailment 
which then discovered themselves to me are now ap- 
parent to all the world. And it is this verification of 
the suggestions of these letters which may now, per- 
haps, justify their publication. 

William Seymour Edwards. 

Charleston-Kanawha, West Virginia, 
September 1, 1906. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. London to Denmark Across the North Sea 1 

II. Esbjerg— Across Jutland, Funen and Zealand, 
the Little Belt and Big Belt to Copenhagen, 
and Friends Met Along the Way 7 

III. Copenhagen, a Quaint and Ancient City 15 

IV. Elsinore and Kronborg— An Evening Dinner 

Party 21 

V. Across the Sund to Sweden and Incidents of 

Travel to Kristiania 40 

VI. A Day Upon the Rand Fjord — Along the 
Etna Elv To Frydenlund — Ole Mon Our 

Driver 51 

VII. A Drive Along the Baegna Elv— the Aurdals 

Vand and Many More to Skogstad 60 

VIII. Over the Height of Land— A Wonderful Ride 

Down the Laera Dal to the Sogne Fjord 68 

IX. A Day Upon the Sogne Fjord 75 

X. From Stalheim to Eida — The Waterfall of 

Skjerve Fos— The Mighty Hardanger Fjord 80 

XI. The Buarbrae and Folgefonden Glaciers- 

Cataracts and Mountain Tarns — Odda to 

Horre 89 

XII. Over the Lonely Haukeli Fjeld— Witches and 

Pixies, and Maidens Milking Goats 96 

XIII. Descending from the Fjelde— The Telemarken 

Fjords — The Arctic Twilight 106 

XIV. Kristiania to Stockholm— A Wedding Party— / 

Differing Norsk and Swede ^^^w 

XV. Stockholm the Venice of the North— Life and ^ 
Color of the Swedish Capital— Manners of 
the People and their King 128 

XVI. How We Entered Russia— The Passport System 
— Difficult to Get Into Russia and More Diffi- 
cult to Get Out 136 

XVII. St. Petersburg— The Great Wealth of the Few 
— The Bitter Poverty of the Many — Condi- 
tions Similar to Those Preceding the French 

Revolution 148 

ix 



X CONTENTS. 

PAGE 
XVIII. En Route to Moscow — Under Military Guard — 

Suspected of Designs on Life of the Czar 158 

XIX. Our Arrival at Moscow — Splendor and Squalor 
— EnligMenment and Superstition — Russia 

Asiatic Rather Than European 167 

XX. The Splendid Pageant of the Russian Mass — 
The Separateness of Russian Religious Feel- 
ing From Modern Thought — Russia Mediae- 
val and Pagan 180 

XXI. The First Snows — Moscow to Warsaw — Fat 
Farm Lands and Frightful Poverty of the 
Mujiks Who Own them and Till them — I Re- 
cover My Passport 189 

XXII. The Slav and the Jew — The Slav's Envy and 

Jealousy of the Jew 201 

XXIII. Across Germany and Holland to England — A 

Hamburg Wein Stube — The "Simple Fisher- 
Folk" of Maarken— Two Gulden at Den Haag 214 

XXIV. Map of North Europe. 

Map of Scandinavia and Baltic Russia, in profile. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



OPPOSITE 
PAGE 

The Author Frontispiece 

The Naero — Sogne Fjord 1 

The North Sea 3 

The Docks, Esbjerg 5 

Our Danish Railway Carriage 7 

My Instructor in Danish 10 - 

Our Danish Friends 12 ' 

The Krystal Gade and Round Tower, Copenhagen 14 

The Oestergade 16 

The Royal Theatre, Copenhagen 17 

The Exchange, Copenhagen 19 

The Gammel Strand 23 

Along the Quays, Copenhagen 26 

An Ancient Moat, Now the Lovely Oersteds Park 30 ' 

A Vista of the Sund 32 

Elsinore 33 

The Sund from Kronborg's Ramparts 35 

The Fishing Boats, Elsinore 37 

A Snap-shot for a Dime, Kronborg 39 

Kronborg 41 

Karl Johans Gade, Kristiania 42 

Vegetable Market, Kristiania 44 

Kristiania, A View of the City 46 

Our Norwegian Train 48 

Along the Etna Elv 50 

Hailing our Steamer, The Rand Fjord 51 

The Old Salt 53 

Ole Mon 55 

Feeding the Ponies, Tomlevolden 58- 

Church of Vestre Slidre 58 

The Distant Snows 60 - 

The Baegna Elv 62^ 

The Granheims Vand 63^- 

A Herd of Cows, Fosheim 63 

A Hamlet Beneath the Fjeld 65- 

The Author by the Slidre Vand 67 

Ricking the Rye 67 

The Protected Road 69 

Three Thousand Feet of Waterfall 71 

Our Little Ship, Laerdalsoeren 74 

The Sogne Fjord— Along the Sogne Fjord 76 

Sudals Gate, on the Sogne Fjord 78 

xi 



Xll ILLUSTEATIONS. 

OPPOSITE 
PAGE 

The Naerodal 80 

Greeting our Boat, Aurland 83 

The Hardanger Fjord 85 

The Soer Fjord — Hardanger 87 

Commingling Lote and Skars Fos 90 

The Espelands Fos 90 

Glacier of Buarbrae 92 

The Gors Vand 92 

The Descending Road to Horre 94 

A Mile Stone 97 

Cattle on the Haukeli Fjeld 97 

The Desolate Haukeli Fjeld 99 

Norse Maiden Milking Goat (2 illustrations) 103 

Our Hostesses, Haukeli-Saeter 106 

A Norse Cabin 106 

A Goat Herd's Saeter 110 ' 

Haukeli Saeter 110 

Tending the Herds 112 - 

Drying Out the Oats 112 

Dalen on the Bandaks Vand 115 

Norse Women Raking Hay 117 

Stockholm 119 

King's Palace, Stockholm 122 ' 

Ancient Swedish Fortress 124" 

A Swedish Church 124 

A Band of Swedish Horses 126 

The Shore of Lake Maelaren, Stockholm 129 

Cathedral of Riddarsholm 131 

Norrbro, Stockholm 133 

Facing the Gale 140 

The Pier, Helsingfors 142 

Fishing Boats Along the Quay, Helsingfors 142 

Market Square, Helsingfors 144 

The Doebln at her Pier, Helsingfors 144 

A Wild Sea — Leaving Helsingfors , 145 

Fishing Boats at Mouth of the Neva 145 

Entering the Neva 149 

Along the Neva 149 

Our Droschky, St. Petersburg 151 

Along the Nevsky-Prospekt 151 

Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan 154 

Our Squealing Stallions 154 

Our Izvostchik 156 

Our Landau, St. Petersburg 160 

A Noble's Troika, St. Petersburg 161 

The Railway Porters, St. Petersburg 161 



ILLUSTRATIONS. XIU 

OPPOSITE 

PAGE 

Our Military Guard, Bargaining for Apples 165 

The Holy Savior Gate, Kremlin 165 

Along the Gostinoi Dvor, Moscow 167 ■ 

Cathedral of the Assumption, Kremlin 167 

The Red Square, Moscow 170 ' 

Begging Pilgrims, St. Basil 170 

Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed, Moscow 172 

Ancient Pavements, Moscow 176 

Bread Vendors, Moscow 176 

The Kremlin beyond the Moskva 179 

Cathedral of St. Savior 181 

A Tram-Car, Moscow 188 

The Out-of-Works 188 

Cemetery, Novo Dievitchy 190 

Monastery Church, Novo Dievitchy 190 

Holy Beggar, Novo Dievitchy 191 

The Kremlin Beneath the Snows 193 

A Station Stop, En Route to Warsaw 197 

Catching a Kopeek — A Beggar 204 

A Cold Day 208 

Along the River Moskva, Moscow 209 

A Russian Jew 211 

Jewish Types, taken in Russia 213 

Jewish Types, taken in America 2i3 

A Dainty Nurse-maid, Berlin 215 

Hamburg Street Traffic 218 

Our Bill of Fare 220 

A Gentleman of Maarken 222 

A Kinder of Maarken 222 

Among Vrow and Kinderen, Maarken 224 

A Load of Hay, Holland 227 

Along the Zuyder Zee 227 

The Pish Market, Den Haag 228 

The Gossips, Den Haag 228 

A Watery Lane, Den Haag 229 

Dutch Toilers 229 

Map of North Europe. 

Map of Scandinavia and Baltic Russia, in profile. 



Through Scandinavia to Moscow* 



L 

London to Denmark Across the North Sea* 

EsBJERG, Denmark, August 25, 1902. 

We came down from London to Harwich toward 
the end of the day. Our train was a "Special" run- 
ning to catch the steamer for Denmark. We were de- 
layed a couple of hours in the dingy, dirty London 
station by reason of a great fog which had crept in 
over Harwich from the North Sea, and then, the boat 
had to wait upon the tide. 

The instant the train backed in alongside the 
station platform — only ten minutes before it would 
pull out — there was the usual scramble and grab to 
seize a seat in the first-carriage-you-can and pande- 
monium reigned. H is well trained by this time, 
however, and I quickly had her comfortably ensconced 
in a seat by a window with bags and shawls pyramided 
by her side the better to hold a place for me. Mean- 
time, I hurried to a truck where stood awaiting me 
a well-tipped porter and together we safely stowed 
two "boxes" into a certain particular "luggage van," 
the number of which I was careful to note so that I 
might be sure quickly to find the "luggage" again, 

(1) 



2 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

when we should arrive at Harwich, else a stranger 
might walk off with it as aptly as with his own. 

Our "carriage" was packed ** full-up" with several 
men and women, who looked dourly at us and at each 
other as they sat glumly squeezed together, elbows in 
each other's ribs. So forbidding was the prospect 
confronting me that I did not presume to attempt a 
conversation. These comrades, however, soon dropped 
out at the way-stations, until only one lone man was 
left, when I took heart and made bold to accost him. 
I found him very civil and, recognizing me to be 
a foreign visitor, he spoke with freedom. One Eng- 
lishman never forgives another for sitting beside him, 
unintroduced, and squeezing him up in a railway 
carriage; but he harbors no such grudge against his 
American cousin, equally the victim of British 
methods. 

Our vis-a-vis had been a volunteer-trooper in 
South Africa, and had just come back to England, 
after two years* hardship and exposure. He had given 
up a good position in order to serve his country, and 
had been promised that the place would be kept open 
for him against his return. He tells me he now finds 
a stay-at-home holds his job. He has '*a wife and two 
little lads to keep," and so far he has had ''no luck 
in finding work." There are thousands of others in 
as bad a fix as he, he says, returned patriots who are 
starving for lack of work. He denounced the entire 
Boer-smashing business most savagely and declared 
that as for South Africa, he "would not take the whole 



THE DANGERS OF THE FOG. 6 

of it for a gift." We hear this sort of talk every- 
where among the people we casually meet. The 
average Englishman takes small pride in his Army. 
"It gives fat jobs to the aristocracy, it is death to 
us," is what I have heard a dozen times remarked. 
Our new acquaintance seemed to feel the better for 
having thus spoken out his mind, and when we parted, 
wished us a "prosperous voyage." 

The ship was in motion within twenty minutes after 
our train reached the Harwich pier. To my lands- 
man's thinking the air was yet murky with the fog. 
Big sirens were booming all about us. The melan- 
choly clang of tidal bells sounded in sombre muffled 
tones from many anchored buoys. It was a drear, 
dank night to leave the land. We moved slowly, 
sounding our own hoarse whistle all the while. I stood 
upon the upper deck peering into the mists till we had 
come well out to sea. There were few boats moving, 
no big ones. Multitudes of small schooners and sloops 
rode at anchor, their danger lights faintly gleaming. 
I wondered we did not run down and crush them, but 
the pilot seemed to apprehend the presence of an- 
other boat even before the smallest ray of light shone 
through the fog. One or two great ships we came 
shockingly close upon. At least, I was jarred more 
than once when their huge black hulks and reaching 
masts suddenly grew up before me out of the dead 
white curtain of the mists. The estuary which leads 
from Harwich to the sea is long and tortuous. Only 
a pilot who has been born upon it, and from boyhood 



4 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

learned its currents and its tides, its shallows and ita 
shoals, may dare to guide a boat along it, even in 
broad day. How much greater the skill and knowl- 
edge required thus to steer a ship through these laby- 
rinthine channels amidst the fogs and blackness of 
such a night! The Captain told me he was always 
uneasy when coming out, no matter when, and never 
felt safe until far out upon the sea. Even in open 
water he must keep the sharpest kind of a watch lest 
some one of the myriad fishing craft which haunt 
these waters, should lie athwart the way. 

The sea was quiet, rolling with a long slow sweU. 
The rising wind soughed softly through the rigging 
when, toward midnight, I at last turned in. 

All day Sunday the North Sea lay smooth and glassy 
as a pond; no hint of the turmoil and tempest which 
so often rage upon its shallow depths. We did not see 
many vessels; far to the north I made out the smoke 
of a steamer which the captain said was bound for 
Kristiansand, in Norway ; and south of us were a few 
sail, which I took to be fishing luggers from Holland. 
Nor were there many seabirds flying. The sky hung 
low and in the gray air was the feel of a storm in the 
offing. Toward dark, about eight o'clock, a misty 
rain settled down upon us, and the rising wind be- 
gan swashing the dripping waters along the decks. 
Toward half past nine we descried a dim glimmer in 
the east, — a beacon light flickering through the night, 
— and then another with different intervals of flash, 
a mile or two out upon the left, and then our ears 




THE DOCKS, ESBJERG. 



CROSSING THE NORTH SEA. 5 

caught the deep bellow of a fog horn across the 
sea. We were nearing the west coast of the Prov- 
ince of Jutland, in Denmark, Our port lay dead 
ahead between the lights. Another hour of cautious 
navigating, for there are many sand bars and shifting 
shoals along this coast, and we came steaming slowly, 
very slowly, among trembling lights — fishing smacks 
at anchor with their night signals burning — and 
then we crept up to a big black wharf. We were 
arrived at Esbjerg. 

The train for Copenhagen (Kjoebenhavn) would 
leave at midnight, an eight-hours' ride and no sleep- 
ing car attached. 

We decided to stay aboard the ship, sleep peace- 
fully in our wide-berthed stateroom and take a train 
at eleven o'clock of the morning, which would give 
us a daylight ride. 

We were entering Denmark by the back door. The 
sea-loving traveler generally approaches by one of 
the ocean liners which sail direct from New York to 
Copenhagen; those who find terror in the sea enter 
by way of Kiel, and an all-rail ride through Holland 
and Germany, crossing the channel to Ostend, Dieppe, 
or the Hook. Only the few voyage across the North 
Sea with its frequent storms — the few who, like our- 
selves, are good sailors and do not fear the stress of 
tide and tempest. We were now at Esbjerg, and 
must cross the entire peninsula of Denmark, its Little 
Belt, its Big Belt and the large islands of Funen and 
Zealand to reach our journey's end. 



6 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

I am already beginning to pick up the Danish 
speech, a mixture of English, German, Dutch and new 
strange throat gutturals, the latter difficult for an 
American larynx to make. And yet so similar is 
this mother tongue of Scandinavia to the modern Eng- 
lish, that I can often tell what a Dane is saying by the 
very similarity of the sounds: "Go Mom" — (good 
morning) , * * Farvel ' ' — ( farewell ) . 

Our fellow passengers were mostly Danes. This is 
their favorite route for coming home. They are a 
quiet, rather pensive people. The men, much of the 
time, were smoking, and drinking beer and a white 
brandy. The women were often sitting in the smok- 
ing room with them, enjoying, I presume, the perfume 
of tobacco, as every right-minded woman should, and 
it may be, also finding solace in the scent of the strong 
brown beer, which they are not themselves indisposed 
to quaff. 

The cooking on this Danish boat has been good. "We 
have keenly appreciated the improvement upon the 
diet of roast beef, boiled mutton, boiled ham, boiled 
potatoes, and boiled peas steeped in mint, which we 
have been compelled to exist upon during the past 
few weeks in Britain. 




OUR DANISH RAILWAY CARRIAGE. 



IL 

Esbjerg — Across Jutland, Fwncn and Zealand, the Little 

Belt and the Big Belt to G)penhagen — 

Friends Met Along the Way. 

Hotel Dagmar C'Dahmar**), 
Copenhagen, Denmark, August 27, 1902. 

Here we are in *'Kjoebenhavn," which word you 
will find it quite impossible properly to pronounce, 
however strenuously your tongue may try. 

My letter, beginning in Esbjerg, was broken short 
by the necessity of sleep. We wisely remained upon 
the ship and took full benefit of our comfortable 
berths. In the morning we were up betimes, obtained 
a cup of coffee and a roll, and then, sending our bags 
and baggage to the railway station, set out afoot. 

The air was misty, full of a fine drizzling rain. It 
was regular Scotch and English weather, but the at- 
mosphere was cooler and not so heavy as in Britain. 
The little stone-and-brick-built town is clean and neat, 
with its main street well asphalted. It lies on a gentle 
slope of hillside which lifts from the water. A giant 
lighthouse, rising from the highest point of land, is 
the first object to meet the view. Back of this, 
upon the level summit, lies the best of the town. The 

(7) 



8 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

buildings are generally of one and two stories, with 
steep, gabled roofs. 

H, in her Scottish "bonnet," and I, in my raincoat, 
were quite impervious to wetness, and we spent the 
morning strolling here and there, stopping to see, 
among other things, the tubs and tanks of fish in the 
market square, where fishwives in big, white caps, 
stood quite heedless of the rain. The fish were almost 
wholly the famous roed spoette (red spots), one 
of the flounder family, much resembling the English 
sole. 

"Wanting cigars, I was tempted into a little shop, 
and found it kept by an intelligent young Dane, who 
instantly confessed to me, in good United States, that 
he had lived in America and there done well. In fact, 
it was plain to see that his heart still beat for the great 
Eepublic. His father had died and he had come back 
to Denmark to care for his old mother, and then, he 
had fallen in love with the blue-eyed daughter of a 
citizen of Esbjerg, an only child. So now, with sev- 
eral little Danes added to his charge, he was fixed 
fast in Esbjerg. But he was "always grieving for 
America," he said. He delighted to see us, and sent 
for his young wife, who came smiling in to us with her 
baby in her arms. H says he told his wife in Danish, 
that we were Americans just like all others she would 
see, if she should ever reach New York ! So I bought 
a box of cigars from him, instead of one or two, and 
found them good smoking and well worth the very 
moderate cost. 



THE PORT OF ESBJERG. 9 

Crossing the market square to a long, low building, 
which somehow had about it that indefinable air sug- 
gestive of a breakfast comfortably cooked, we came to 
an inn, in the low-ceilinged dining room of which 
were little tables set about upon the sanded floor. 
Two or three men of the sea were smoking in one 
corner, a bar and a red-cheeked barmaid were in an- 
other, and two huge, yellow, Great-Dane dogs occupied 
most of the remaining space. We chose a table by 
the window and H ordered roed spoette, rolls and 
coffee. The fish was delicious, possessing a harder, 
sweeter flesh than the English sole; and rolls with 
salted butter rejoiced my palate, for I am dreadfully 
tired of English butter with no salt ; and then we were 
given big brown pancakes with currant jelly, all we 
could eat. It was a breakfast fit for a Viking. The 
bill was only three kroner and twenty oere, which 
equals about eighty-six cents. 

At the railway station, a mile from the docks, our 
tickets, bought in London, gave us the best on the 
train, better than similar carriages in England, for 
here they are bigger, with larger windows and the 
cars are set on trucks. 

The journey to Copenhagen was over and through 
a sandy, flat and slightly rolling country, more care- 
fully tilled and more generally cultivated than in 
England, with more grain, wheat and rye ; with more 
vegetables, turnips, carrots, cabbage and potatoes. 
There were cattle, herds of large red cows, for Den- 
mark is now the dairy of all Europe. But I saw 



10 THROUGH SCAlvrDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

no steers, nor beef cattle, fattening for the market, 
and but few sheep; nor any hogs running afield — 
the last are probably kept up. The houses are 
set singly upon the farms, are surrounded by out- 
buildings, and are usually of one story and often 
big and rambling with ells and gables, and generally 
have thatched roofs. The barns are big and sub- 
stantial. More people are here upon the land than 
in England, and not living in clustered villages, as 
in France; the fields are divided usually by hedges. 
There are sluggish waterways and canals, and ponds 
where fish are bred and raised for market; and al- 
most every hilltop is capped with a Dutch-looking 
windmill. 

The train moved deliberately. It made from twenty 
to twenty-five miles an hour, stopping a long time at 
each station. "We hadn't gone far when a bald-pated, 
round-headed IJerr climbed in and we speedily fell 
into talk with him. H speaks Danish enough to get 
on, and I use my pocket dictionary, and pick up 
what I can. His name was Hansen and he "owns" 
the ** Hotel Kikkenborg," at **Brammige," wherever 
that may be. He told us of the country we were pass- 
ing through and helped me on the Danish gutturals. 
You must gurgle the sounds down in your gullet as 
though you were quite filled with water, and the more 
profound the depth from which the sound comes forth, 
the more perfect the speech. We lost him at the first 
change of cars, when we boarded an immense ferry- 
boat to cross the strait of water called the Little 




MY INSTRUCTOR IN DANISH. 



THE LITTLE BELT AND BIG BELT. 11 

Belt, which separates the main land from the large 
island of Funen, but we found ourselves again in 
kindly company, this time, with a gray-bearded man 
and two ladies, his wife and daughter. He was 
** Inspector of Edifices" for the Government. They 
had been spending a few weeks on the island of Fanoe 
at Nordby, a fashionable seaside resort much patron- 
ized by the gentry of Copenhagen. He talked with 
me in fluent German, and the ladies conversed readily 
in French, while all spoke with H in Dansk and 
so we got on, fell fast friends and were introduced 
to a beau of the Froeken, a young ** Doctor" who 
had "just taken his degree." We sat together while 
crossing the island of Funen and on the ferryboat 
top all through the long sail across the Big Belt which 
divides Funen from the island of Zealand. Our 
friends here pointed out to us where it was that 
Charles X of Sweden, and his army of foot and horse 
and guns made their dare-devil passage on the ice 
that night in January, 1658, crossing the Little and 
Big Belts to Zealand and Copenhagen, forcing the 
beaten Danes by the Peace of Roskilde to cede the 
great Provinces of Skaania, Halland and Bleking, 
which made Sweden forever henceforth a formidable 
European state, — ' ' God 's work, ' ' the Swedes declared, 
for these salty waters were never before frozen solid 
enough to bear an army's weight, — nor have they 
been since. We parted only at the journey's end. 
Our friends were pleasant people of the aristocratic 
office-holding class, content to live simply on the mod- 



12 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

est stipend the Government may grant, who neither 
speak nor read English, and who listened to the tales 
of bigness in America with doubting wonder. "A 
building twenty stories high!" ** Impossible ! " 
"Eighty millions of people i" "Incredible!" 
"America already holds four hundred thousand 
Danes — one-fifth of the Danish race." "Ja! Alas! 
That is too true ! " " Our young men are never satis- 
fied to come back to stay when once they have lived 
in America!" "Our young men don't return, it's 
hard upon our girls." 

Our new found friends, when we lunched upon 
the big ferryboat, introduced us to that very Danish 
dish called Smoer Broed, thickly buttered rye 
bread overlaid with raw herring or smoked goose 
breast, a Viking dainty — a salty appetizer well calcu- 
lated to make the Norseman quaff from his flagon 
with more than usual vim, and to drive an American 
in hurried search of plain water ! These salty snacks 
of cold bread and cold fish are as eagerly devoured 
and enjoyed by the Scandinavian as are the peppery, 
stinging eatables for which every Mexican palate 
yearns. 

It was dusk when we arrived in the large and com- 
modious Main station at Copenhagen. The suburbs 
of the city were hidden from us by the gathering 
darkness, and the electric lights were glowing when 
we left the train. 

We missed General and Mrs. C at the station, 
so great was the crowd, but found them when we 




OUR DANISH FRIENDS. 



JUTLAND TO FUNEN AND ZEALAND. 13 

came to our hotel, the Dagmar, they having them- 
selves missed us and followed on our track. 

There are many good hotels in Copenhagen and this 
is among the larger and more popular stopping places 
of the Danes themselves. It is built along the clean 
Vestre Boulevard, with umbrageous trees in front 
of it, and possesses that rare thing, an elevator. In 
the dining room we sit at little tables, and find the 
cooking much superior to what one generally meets 
in England. It is more after the French sort, the 
Danes priding themselves greatly upon their soups 
and sauces. In our rooms, which look out upon the 
broad, paved boulevard, the furniture is old style 
mahogany, very substantial, and in the corner there 
is one of those immense porcelain stoves reaching 
to the ceiling, which is the general mode of heating 
large rooms in these Scandinavian lands. 

Copenhagen is a city of four hundred thousand 
people, one-quarter of the estimated population of 
Denmark, and the city is growing steadily at the ex- 
pense of the country, — increasing too fast for a land 
the population of which is as steadily growing less. 
English is said to be the fashionable foreign tongue 
in court circles, by reason of the British royal con- 
nection; but among the people the German speech is 
steadily and stealthily taking a foremost place, and 
this despite the fact that the Danes dislike Germany 
and view the Germans with well-founded fear. You 
will talk to a Dane but a few moments before he 
is pouring out his heart to you about the atrocious 



14 THROUGH SCAITOINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

robbery of the splendid Provinces of Sleswik and 
Hoktein, of which Bismarck despoiled the little king- 
dom nearly forty years ago. Almost half of Denmark 
was then lopped off at a single blow, — ^nor England 
nor Bussia interfering to save the Danes, — and now 
they are ever in uneasy spirit lest Germany encroach 
yet more upon them and ultimately devour them, land 
and sea. They feel she is incessantly creeping on to 
them with all the cunning of a hungry cat. 




THE KRYSTAL GADE AND ROUND TOWER, 
COPENHAGEN. 



nL 

* G>penhag:eny a Quaint and Ancient Qty. 

Kjoebenhavn, Dannmark, 
(Copenhagen, Denmark), August 28, 1902. 

The Copenhagener declares that his beloved ** Kjoe- 
benhavn" is not really an ancient city, although he 
admits it has been in active business since the middle 
of the tenth century, nearly one thousand years. 

My Danish friends assert that it is my "Yankee 
eye," which is so new, and prove the modernity of 
their town by telling me how many times it has been 
bombarded, how often sacked and razed, how fre- 
quently burned up; and yet, despite their facts, I 
still make bold to say the city bears the markings of 
an ancient town. 

Long, long ago, even before the time of King Gorm 
the Old, here were markets by the water's side, 
where the fisherman brought his catch, the peasant 
fetched his eggs and milk and cheese and what the 
soil might yield, where the itinerant merchant came 
to show and trade his wares. These handy markets 
by the sea were at first moved constantly about; by 
and by they came to be held, year after year, in the 
self-same spot; the temporary clustered settlement 

(15) 



16 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

became a lasting town. As the centuries rolled on 
these market hamlets expanded into a single com- 
mercial rendezvous for all the northern world. Thus 
Copenhagen won her name {Kopman-haven — ^mer- 
chant port) and grew until her commerce made her 
the heir to the trade and trafi&c of the Hanseatic 
League, and she was recognized as supreme mistress 
of the commerce of the North by London and Bremen, 
Brussels and Bordeaux, as well as by the merchant 
fleets of Venice and the Levant. 

Those were the days when her Kings and hardy 
seamen would as lief drink and fight and die as eat 
and live; their very recklessness made them masters 
of the North; they even annexed the mighty Norse- 
man, and made Norway a Danish Province ; they ham- 
mered and held in check their doughty cousins, the 
Swedes; they brought beneath their sway the Prov- 
inces of Skaania, of Halland and of Bleking, the 
southern portion of what is now known as Sweden; 
they dominated the cities along the shores of the 
North and Baltic Seas. 

Copenhagen became, in fact as well as in name, the 
veritable capital of the North. In politics and in 
intrigue she played the master hand. She gathered 
to herself the arts and the sciences, the fashion and 
the elegance, of the North ; and to-day, although war- 
like pride and power have fallen from her, although 
trade and commerce have lessened in her midst, yet 
the arts and the sciences, the culture and the elegance 
are still her own, and the fine old city claims to be as 




THE OESTERGADE, COPENHAGEN. 



COPENHAGEN. 17 

markedly as of yore the intellectual center of the 
Scandinavian race. 

Copenhagen is a flat-lying city; it has no hills 
in it, while there are many canals and watery lanes 
which wind through it and lead to the sea, or as 
the Danes would say the 8und (Sound), — ^that nar- 
row strait which links the Baltic to the Kattegat, 
where Denmark and Sweden appear once to have split 
apart. 

The buildings are generally of brick, sometimes of 
stone, never of wood; they are large and substantial, 
often four and five stories high, with gabled roofs, 
sharp and steep, covered with tiles. 

In the older parts of the city, the streets are narrow, 
and twist and turn and change their names even more 
often than the Rues of Paris. In the newer section, 
toward the north and northwest, there are long 
straight boulevards and straight cross streets, and the 
inevitable air of modern monotony. 

The feeling and impression which stole over me 
the first morning I strolled about the city became 
almost one of sadness. The wistful, pensive faces of 
the people; their unobtrusive politeness; the inconse- 
quential traffic of drays and carts along the quiet 
streets; canals and quays half empty where there 
should have been big packs of boats; absence every- 
where of bustle and ado, — all these were al- 
most pathetic. It might have been a Puri- 
tan Sabbath, so silent stood the big stone docks and 
piers among the lapping waters. There was none of 
2 



18 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

the ponderous movement of London, none of the live- 
liness of Paris, nor the busy-ness of Hamburg, of 
Bremen, of Amsterdam, of Rotterdam and Antwerp, 
although once Copenhagen was peer of any one. The 
bales of goods, the tons of merchandise which once 
filled her lofts and cellars are no longer there. The 
commerce which once made the city rich and gave her 
power has ebbed away. She is far fallen into com- 
mercial and industrial decay. 

The causes which have wrought this collapse of the 
once great city are, perhaps, difficult to analyze. At 
least, those Danes with whom I have talked upon the 
matter are not at aU agreed. Nor are they united 
upon the solution of the problem of restoring the city 
to the proud place she once held as metropolis of the 
northern world. 

Some tell me that after the demise of the present 
King, and the passing of Sweden's ruler to the Halls 
of Valhalla, then wUl it be possible for the Scandi- 
navian peoples to come together in one permanent 
federation, or federal pact, where the Norwegian- 
Democratic spirit shall instil new energy into the 
now moribund political body of the sister states, and 
that then Copenhagen will be the natural capital of 
this free and potent Scandinavian state, and then will 
come to her the splendor and dignity justly her due. 

Others declare, and declare with a flash of terror in 
their eyes, that the only hope for Copenhagen, the 
only hope for the pitiful remnant of the once proud 
Kingdom of Denmark, is to be wholly devoured by 



COPENHAGEN. 19 

the Hohenzollem Ogre, to be by him chewed fine, 
gulped down, digested and assimilated as part of the 
flesh and blood of the waxing German Empire. Then 
will Copenhagen become the chief seaport of the Ger- 
man Hinterlands to the south, then will the import- 
ance of Bremen and Hamburg and Kiel be expanded 
into the new vigor that will have come to Copenhagen. 
They point to the inevitableness of this destiny as 
evidenced by the subtle, silent, incessant encroach- 
ment of the German tongue among the people of the 
city as well as throughout the land, and by the con- 
tinuous invasion and settlement of the city and 
country by men and women of German breed. They 
say the Imperial monster grips them in a clutch 
whence there is no escape. 

Whatever the future may have in store for stricken 
Denmark and Copenhagen, it is clear enough to the 
apprehension of the friendly stranger that the noble 
city is ailing and benumbed. She stagnates, and only 
revolution and rebirth into a greater Scandinavian 
state, or Germanic conquest and absorption, will re- 
store her to her former place. It is natural for an 
American to hope for Denmark and her people a 
rehabilitation through the uplifting influence of a 
Scandinavian Republic. 

There are fine shops in Copenhagen; behind the 
unpretentious fronts along the Oestergade, the 
Amagertorv, the Vimmelskaft and Nygade and 
neighboring streets is stored great wealth of fabrics 
and of merchandise. Here we saw the notably hand- 



20 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

some pottery and artistic porcelain ware for which 
Copenhagen is already famous beyond the sea; and 
H and her mother have delightedly bought several 
charming pieces of the latter and ordered them sent 
forward to New York. They have also quite lost their 
hearts, and certainly their kroners, over the exquisite 
gold and silver and enamel work manufactured here, 
while they declare the laces and drawn work — ^partic- 
ularly what is called Eedebo — excels anything of 
the kind they have discovered in London. The Dane 
is a poet, a dreamer, an artist; he is also a patient 
artisan, and what he produces ranks among the 
world's best work. 

Passing along the narrow sidewalks you would 
never suspect what is stored behind the plain ex- 
teriors, for the Dane has not yet learned the art 
of window display, nor has he acquired the skill of 
so showing his goods that the buyer is caught at 
a single glance. If you would purchase, you must 
have already determined what you want, and then, 
upon asking for it, will be given liberal choice. 

The shops are mostly small, each seller dealing in a 
single ware. Only one Dane, a wide-awake newcomer 
from Chicago, has dared to introduce the complex 
methods of "department*' trade. He has opened an 
immense establishment called the Magazin du Nord, 
where thus far is done a rushing business. But the 
conservative merchants of Copenhagen have not yet 
become so well assured of the success of this innova- 
tion that they are willing to follow the example set. 



COPENHAGEN. 21 

In company with the ladies I have been out all the 
afternoon along these narrow streets — streets where 
the narrow sidewalks are altogether insufficient to 
accommodate the passing crowds, which consequently 
fill up the middle of the way — and we find the Frus 
and Froekens of Copenhagen apparently as much 
devoted to what is called ** shopping" as our own fair 
dames at home. Buxom and yellow-haired and rosy- 
cheeked, they throng the streets each afternoon. 
They are comely to look upon, and carry them- 
selves with more graceful carriage than do the women 
of England. They walk deliberately, with none of the 
nervous scurry of their transatlantic sisters. Indeed, 
it is hinted to me, they have not come out so much to 
buy as to meet some friend or neighbor, and exchange 
a bit of news or gossip in one of the numerous and 
cozy cafes where is sold conditterie: — candies and 
chocolates and coffee and little cakes. 

Next to conditterie, the Copenhagener is fondest 
of his books and the town abounds in bookshops, big 
and little. Every Dane reads and writes his native 
tongue, and among the educated, English and French 
and German are generally understood. In the book 
stores I visited I was always addressed in English, 
and found French, German and English and even 
American books upon the shelves; and more news- 
papers and magazines are published in Copenhagen, 
a Danish friend declares, than in any other city in 
Europe of its size. The Danes have, too, a widely es- 
tablished system of free circulating libraries and book 



22 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

clubs, which extend throughout the countryside of 
Zealand and Funen and Jutland, as well as in the 
towns, while Copenhagen is supplied also from the 
extensive coUectionls of the University and Royal 
Libraries. 

The public schools and the University we did not 
see, for the season was the vacation interval, and the 
teachers, professors and students were all dispersed. 
But the schools and University of Copenhagen are 
modernly equipped. The Dane is intelligent above 
all else, and he has always paid great heed to the ade- 
quate education of his race. Indeed, Copenhagen 
was the first city in Europe to establish real public 
schools, opening them in every parish more than 
three hundred years ago. 

There are many Torvs about the city, market- 
places where all sorts of things have once been sold, 
but which are now become wide-open public squares. 
The old word Torv has already lost its ancient mean- 
ing, even as has the word Circus, which in London 
first sounds so strange to American ears. But while 
the Gammelstorv, the Nytorv, the Kongen's Nytorv 
and many others are now degenerated into these 
mere open breathing spaces between the big build- 
ings of the town, there are yet Torvs where fish, and 
flowers, meats and vegetables, and things else are 
offered for sale. The most attractive of them all to 
me were those where are sold the flowers and the fish. 

In the Amagertorv were heaps of pale and puny 
roses, and diminutive asters and chrysanthemums, 




THE GAMMEL STRAND, COPENHAGEN. 



COPENHAGEN. 23 

along with splendid pansies — "stepmother flowers/' 
as the Danes call them — and luxuriant piles of mi- 
gnonette, and big baskets of pinks and phloxes ; where 
rosy-cheeked women, in starched white caps, smil- 
ingly urged me to buy, and one Froeken with a 
wealth of yellow hair and cobalt-blue eyes, pinned 
on my coat a monstrous pansy for houtonniere. 

Among the fishwives of the Gammel Strand 
there was always lively stir, for their fisk must 
early find a buyer, and by midday they them- 
selves must be back to their nets and boats. These 
Danish fishwives, moreover, have a burden of re- 
sponsibility quite unknown to their English, German, 
Dutch and French sisters. Not merely must they sell 
the fish which the men turn over to their keeping, but 
they must also preserve it hearty and alive, else the 
dainty Danish housewife will not buy. The fish are 
kept in large tubs and tanks filled with fresh sea 
water, where they swim about as keen and lively as 
they might do in the sea. The buyer scrutinizes the 
contents of these tubs with a fine and practiced eye; 
she picks out the fish which swims and splashes to 
her mind ; has it lifted out alive, and carries it 
home in a bucket of water which she has brought to 
the market for that purpose. A fish which is dead, 
a fish which has died of strangulation in the air, 
is looked upon with horror and rejected as unfit 
for food by all right-acting Danish stomachs. No 
dead fish, preserved from becoming stale through the 
use of chemicals, ever enters a Danish kitchen. Is 



24 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

it any wonder then, that the buxom red-cheeked 
women and sturdy men of these seafaring lands pre- 
fer a square meal of sweet fresh fish to any other! 
Sauntering along the Strand I espied the cod and 
mackerel and herring under names I did not know, 
and everywhere foremost among them all the now 
familiar roed spoette, the Danish epicure's delight. 

The streets of London are choked with moving 
vehicles, or those drawn up in line awaiting fares. 
In Copenhagen one is struck at once by the absence 
of the equipages of the rich, the very limited number 
of cabs anywhere about, as well as the small number 
of heavy drays, even upon the wholesale business 
streets. One might almost say that the streets would 
seem deserted if it were not for the pigeons and the 
dogs. There must be many dove-cotes in Copenhagen 
and the birds certainly have hosts of friends. But the 
dog, the unabashed and capricious dog, is the real 
king of Denmark's capital. After seeing him in Hol- 
land and in France, where his dogship is a faithful 
co-worker with man, toiling all the long day and 
longer year to eke out the income of his master, one 
almost envies the lot of the dogs of Copenhagen. 
These beasts abound throughout the city ; neither tag 
nor muzzle adorns them, nor do owners seemingly 
claim them, but from puppyhood to gaunt old age 
they lead a boisterous and vagabond life, to the terror 
of small children and their nurses, and the well- 
gowned women who may chance to cross their trail. 
Whether they survive through performing the office 



COPENHAGEN. 25 

of scavenger, as do the dogs of Constantinople, I have 
never been informed, but whatever the cause, the 
curs of Copenhagen take as full possession of that 
town as do the tame vultures of Vera Cruz. 

We visited, of course, the many objects of interest 
the tourist is expected to see ; we studied the splendid 
collection of the masterpieces of Thorvaldsen, housed 
in the stately building where also is set his tomb; 
we looked at the collection of ethnological relics, one 
of the most notable in the world; we lingered in the 
old castle of Charlottenborg, and the new art galleries 
where are gathered many of the master paintings of 
which the Danish capital is so proud; we admired 
the great round tower, up the spiral causeway of 
which a squadron of dragoons may ride to the very 
top, and Peter the Great ascended on horseback; 
we duly marveled at the much bepraised Fredriks 
Kirke, a marble edifice, smothered beneath a pond- 
erous and ornate dome; and H and I spent a de- 
lightful hour in the noble Vor Frue Kirke, where 
her grandmother was wedded some sixty years ago; 
the banks and the Bourse, the imposing new Hotel 
de Ville — the finest modern building in Denmark — 
the Legislative Palace, Christiansborg and Rosenborg 
and Amalienborg and Fredriksberg. We saw what of 
them the public is allowed to see; we also drove and 
strolled upon the fine wide Lange Linie Boulevard 
along the water side, shaded by ancient and umbrage- 
ous lindens, whence may be viewed the inner and outer 
harbors and Free Port and the spacious, new and half 



26 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

empty docks, and much of the shipping, and where of 
a pleasant afternoon the fashion and beauty of the 
city are wont to ride and drive. We joined in with the 
multitude upon the long, straight Fredriksberggade, 
where the life and movement of the city may be 
watched and studied, even as upon New Orleans' Canal 
Street and New York's Broadway; and we did all 
else that well instructed Americans are taught to do. 
But after all, these are the things that Baedeker and 
the guide books tell about. To me it is ever of higher 
interest to learn from the people themselves by word 
and touch what my own senses aid me to see and hear, 
and so it was only when I met some of my wife's 
Danish kin, and a broad and burly Berserker clasped 
me in his arms and implanted a smacking kiss upon 
either cheek, ere I knew him to be of her relations, — 
that I felt my acquaintance begun with the most 
polished and elegant branch of the Scandinavian 
race. 

Other parts of nights and days we spent with 
friends in the lovely Tivoli gardens, where all the 
Copenhagen world, high and low, rich and poor alike, 
are wont to meet in simple and democratic assemblage, 
equally bent upon having a good time. **Have you 
seen Tivoli?" is ever almost the first question a Co- 
penhagener will put. There we watched the famous 
pantomime in the little open booth beneath the stars, 
a sort of Punch and Judy show; there we entered 
the great music hall where the Royal band plays, 
and the crowded audiences of music-loving Danes al- 





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COPENHAGEN. 27 

ways applaud ; there we drank the Danish beer which 
is admitted to be the best on earth — so a Danish neigh- 
bor whispered in my ear. Tivoli is the Copenhagener'a 
elysimn. When he is blue he gets himself to Tivoli; 
when he feels gay he travels to Tivoli; alone or in 
company he goes to Tivoli, and he goes there as 
often as time will permit, which is usually every 
night. 

A most diflBcult problem for Copenhagen has been 
that of draining and sewering the city. It lies so 
low, almost at the dead level of the sea, and the tides 
of these Baltic waters are so insignificant — ^ten to 
twelve inches only — that for many centuries Copen- 
hagen has been a most unhealthy city, infected by 
cesspools, tainted by blind drains, and defiled by ac- 
cumulated poisons, until its death rate was higher 
than that of any other city in Europe. But at last 
the problem is solved. Forced water and giant suc- 
tion pumps wash and drain out the elaborate system 
of pipes, and spill the death-laden wastage at a distant 
point into the sea, and with this transformation Copen- 
hagen has become a measurably healthy city. 

Perhaps it is this century-long fight with death, 
plague and epidemic knocking continually at her 
doors, which has endowed Copenhagen with so many 
fine hospitals and public charities for the care of the 
sick, — few cities in Europe are so elaborately pro- 
vided. Hand in hand with the hospitals are also in- 
stitutions for caring for the destitute and very poor. 
Denmark has never followed England's pauper- 



28 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

creating system, but the beggar on the street is 
promptly put in jail, while the deserving poor is 
given a kindly and helping hand. 

One of the most charming spectacles of the city is 
its extensive public gardens, where the ancient de- 
fenses are converted into parks, and the moats are 
transformed into ponds and little lakes where swans 
and geese are kept, and boys sail toy boats. The land- 
ward side of the city is thus almost encircled with 
these pleasure grounds. One morning we were cross- 
ing one of these gardens, the lovely Oersteds Park, 
when I caught a pretty picture with my kodak, a 
little two-years-old tot learning to make her first 
courtesy to a little boy of four or five. She dropped 
and ducked and bent her little body with all the 
grace of a Duchess of the Court. 

Denmark is about the size of three-fifths of West 
Virginia, comprises fifteen thousand square miles 
and contains less than two millions of people, — ^about 
sixteen hundred thousand. She possesses no deposits 
of coal or iron, no forests of valuable timber; she has 
few manufactures. Her people are farmers making 
a pinched living off the land, raising lean crops and 
selling butter and cheese, or they are crowded— one- 
fourth of them, — into the city of Copenhagen, or they 
are gaining a hardy livelihood upon the sea. And yet 
this diminutive kingdom puts up $275,000 a year for 
the keeping of the King, and also provides him and 
his family, tax free, with palaces and castles, and es- 
tates whereon to fish and hunt and play. 




AN ANCIENT MOAT, NOW THE LOVELY 
OERSTEDS PARK. 



COPENHAGEN. 29 

To an American mind it is amazing that a compe- 
tent people will accept and suffer burdens such as 
these. 

In the great state of New York, with its seven mil- 
lions of people, with wealth of coal and iron, with 
immense primeval forests, with cities whose commerce 
expands with a swiftness almost incredible, the Gov- 
ernor is paid $15,000 a year, and allowed a single man- 
sion wherein to dwell. Massachusetts, Vermont and 
Michigan, and many other commonwealths, pay their 
Governors but $1,000 per year, without a mansion for 
their residence. 

The mighty Republic of the United States itself, 
with a continent for domain, and eighty millions of 
people, pays its President $50,000 per year, and gives 
him the use of the White House for his home. 

Therefore, do you wonder, as I stroll about this 
fine old city, and look into the unhopeful, wistful faces 
of its plainly clad, not over-rich nor over-busy people, 
that I begin to comprehend why Copenhagen holds 
the highest record for suicides of any city in the 
world, and why so many of her vigorous, and alert 
and capable, young men continually forsake their 
native land for the greater opportunities and freer 
political and industrial atmosphere of the United 
States ? 

The Dane always gets on if you give him half a 
chance. He is called the "Frenchman of the North." 
Graceful and supple in his manners, with a mouthful 
of courtesies of speech, he is naturally a social diplo- 



30 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

mat. The blunt Norwegian calls him a fop. The 
martial Swede sneers at his want of fight. But the 
Dane has always held his own, and as a financier, a 
diplomat and man-of-the-world able to make the best 
out of the situation he may be in, he still gives proof 
of possessing his full share of the Scandinavian brain. 




A VISTA OF THE SUND. 



IV. 

Elsinore and Kronborg — An Evening: Dinner Patty. 

Helsinoere, Dannmark, August 29, 1902. 

We left Copenhagen Friday evening, about four 
o'clock, from the Nordbane station. We were in 
plenty of time. Nobody hurries in Denmark. The 
train of carriages, with their side doors wide open, 
stood on the track ready to start. Prospective pas- 
sengers and their friends moved about chatting, or 
saying good-bye. It was a local train to Elsinore, 
where it would connect with the ferry across the 
Sund to Helsingborg and there with the through 
express to Stockholm and Kristiania, a night's ride. 
We would go to Elsinore, and there spend the night, 
and go on by daylight in the morning. 

A good many acquaintances had come down to see 
us off, just for the sake of friendliness, I had kissed 
all the rosy-cheeked Froekens and been kissed by 
the Frus, having dexterously escaped the embraces of 
the men, when there loomed large before me an im- 
mense Dane, near six feet high and proportionate 
in girth, brown-bearded and blue-eyed, holding an 
enormous bouquet in either hand, an American flag 
waving from the midst of each. He made straight for 

(31) 



32 THROUGH SCAISTDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

me, folded me up among the flowers and kissed me 
joyfully on either cheek, and all before I really knew 
just what had taken place ; then he doffed his hat, and 
bowing profoundly, presented first to me and then 
to H one of the bouquets with which he was loaded. 
And these bouquets were tied up with great white 
ribbons! Of course, we were evidently but newly 
wed. We suddenly became of interest to the entire 
company. Nor was there escape, for General C is well 
known and popular in Copenhagen. Others now came 
up and were introduced, and H and I held a levSe 
right then and there, and of kisses and embraces I 
made no count. 

The ride was along the Sund, that lovely stretch 
of salt water, only a few miles wide, which joins the 
Baltic Sea and the Atlantic. It is more like the Hud- 
son River below "West Point than anything I know, 
except that the shores are low and more generally 
wooded to the water's edge. Or, perhaps I should 
say that it is another and narrower Long Island 
Sound, as you see it a few miles out from Jamaica 
Bay. The busy waters were alive with a multitu- 
dinous traffic from Russia and Germany ana Sweden 
and Denmark itself, and the fishing vessels that 
abound along these coasts. Here and there villas and 
fine country houses peeped out among the trees. The 
Sund is the joy of the Dane. He loves it, and the 
stranger who looks upon it does not forget it. One 
then understands why the Danish poets have sung so 
loudly of it. 




ELSINORE. 



ELSINORE AND KRONBORG. 33 

Our way lay through much cultivated land, market 
gardens sending their produce to Copenhagen, dairy 
farms where is made some of that famous Danish 
butter every Londoner prefers to buy, and which is 
sold all around the world. Here and there we passed 
a little town, always with its sharp-steepled Lutheran 
church and dominie 's snug manse along its side. The 
church, the Lutheran church in Denmark, is no trifling 
power. It is as bigoted and well entrenched as is 
the Roman hierarchy in Mexico and Spain. "We 
should have liked to be wedded in the Vor Frue 
Kirke, where the dear old grandmother had been 
married. But it is a Lutheran church, and we were 
Dissenters, and without the pale. Nor could we 
present the necessary proof. We had no papers to 
show we had been duly born. Nor had we legal docu- 
ments to prove that our parents were our very own. 
Nor could we show papers in proof that we had 
been christened and were legally entitled to our 
names, nor that we had been regularly confirmed. 
Without these documents, sealed and authenticated 
by the state, and in our case also by the United States, 
no Lutheran pastor would have dared to try and make 
us one. So we ran the gauntlet of less stringent Eng- 
lish law, in itself quite bad enough, and lost the ex- 
perience of the quaint Danish ceremonial in the noble 
church. 

At the fine big Government station in Helsinoere 
(Elsinore) — for the Government owns and runs the 
railroads in Denmark, just as it does in Germany and 
3 



34 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

mucli of France — we were met by an aunt and uncle 
and cousin of H 's. They were a charming old couple, 
and the son was a young naval engineer (shipbuilder) , 
working in the ship yard at Helsinoere. All have 
lived in America and speak our tongue. We were to 
dine with them and spend the evening, when General 
and Mrs. C would go home on the last train at 
10 p. M. I left the ladies together, while D and I 
strolled over to the ancient, yet formidable, fortress 
of Kronborg, which for centuries has commanded the 
gateway to the Baltic. Built of Norwegian granite, 
when erected it was believed to be impregnable. Its 
casemates, lofty walls, turrets and towers frowned 
threateningly across the three-mile strait to Helsing- 
borg in Sweden, and no boat sailed past except it 
first paid the dues. To-day, these walls of rock, 
these ramparts in the air, no longer terrify the 
mariner. Sund taxes are no longer levied! The 
ancient fortress does little else than fire an occasional 
salute. But the Danes still love and honor it, and a 
few soldiers are stationed in it, a solitary guard. 

A vista of the Sund I tried to kodak from the 
top of the great tower, and I bribed a soldier for a 
dime to let me take his manly form, although a camera 
is forbidden within the precincts of this place of war. 

But Kronborg is famous for other things than mere 
Danish tolls and wars. Kronborg it is, where Ham- 
let's shade still nightly wanders along the desolate 
ramparts. There it is that the Danish prince beheld 
his father's ghost. There he kept watch at night with 



ELSINORE AND KRONBORG. 35 

Horatio and Marcellus. And close by in the park of 
Marienlyst Castle is Hamlet's grave. We did not see 
it, but many pilgrims do. 

Then we descended into the deep dungeons, or part 
of them, and a pretty, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed Danish 
lass told us tales of Holger Danske, who lives down 
in the deepest pits, whose long white beard is fast 
grown to the table before which he sits, and who is 
to come forth some day and by his might restore to 
the Danish race its former great position on the 
earth; and she told us also of the human tragedies 
which have in past ages been enacted in these keeps. 
She spoke in soft, lisping, musical Danish, the only 
sweet Danish I have heard ; for the Copenhagen speech 
is jerky, the consonants are chopped short, and the 
vowels are deep gurgled in the throat, difficult for 
foreign ears to comprehend. 

After seeing the fortress, we visited an ancient 
monastery, suppressed when the Roman church was 
driven from these northern Lutheran lands, and now 
become an Old Ladies' Home — shocking transforma- 
tion in the contemplation of those monkish shades 
which may yet roam the forsaken cloisters ! — of which 
institution the old uncle is now Superintendent with 
Government pension for life ! 

And then we came to the cozy home where the ladies 
were already met. We entered a narrow doorway, 
a sort of interior storm door, and turned to the right 
into a comfortable sitting room, beyond which was the 
dining room, with the table set. The aunt is a gentle. 



36 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

round-faced, rosy-cheeked little woman, in a white 
lace cap and the prettiest of manners. "With her was 
on old spinster friend, Froeken , a slim, wizen- 
faced dame of sixty, in brown stuff dress, with tight 
sleeves and close fitting waist, and old lace at the 
throat, fastened by a big mediaeval-looking gold 
brooch, and with a gold chain about her neck. She 
possessed very small, bright black eyes, and lips that 
stuck straight out. She courtesied, — dropped down 
straight about ten inches and came up quick, a sort of 
bob — smiled, and said in Danish, "she was rejoiced 
to meet H's 'Mand.' ** All were very friendly, and 
H to have caught a Mand, sure enough, was treated 
with distinction. 

The table was set for eight ; there was beer in glass 
decanters, cold fried fish, cold smoked goose breast, 
cold smoked salmon (raw), cold sardines, cold calves- 
head jelly, cold beef loaf, cold bread, black bread, 
rye bread, cold rolls (hard and shiny with caraway 
seeds in them) , gooseberry jelly, spiced currants, and 
also tea, this latter piping hot. At each place was 
set a pile of salted butter (at least a pound) on a little 

dish. I sat next * ' Tante/' with Froeken across 

the table from me, her black eyes boring me through 
with steady gleam. You take your fish up by the tail 
and eat him as you would a piece of bread. "Butter 
him thick, yes, thick," "Tante" said to me. I laid 
on about half an inch, she did, they all did. It was 
delicious butter and that fish went down wonderfully 
slick. The goose breast was good, but I discerned 




FISHING BOATS, ELSINORE. 



AN EVENING DINNER PARTY. 37 

it to have been a gander. The raw herring I did 
not find so attractive as the goose. There were also 
several sorts of cheese, of which every one ate much. 
You put a heavy layer of butter on your bread, then 
a layer of thin cut cheese, then a layer of herring or 
sardine or salmon, and eat it fast. There was no hot 
food, there never is. The rule is to stow away cold 
fish, butter and cheese, and wash it down with the 
strong brown beer. The sweets are then taken to top 
off with. Pickles and preserves together — ^just like 
the Germans. (I have not yet run into the sour foods 
in which the German stomach delights.) Having be- 
gun with a mild cheese, you gradually ascend to the 
strongest with the final sweets. H says the meal was 
only "supper," not dinner, but I confess I am so 
mixed on these Scandinavian meals, that I cannot yet 
tell the difference. At breakfast, the Danes take only 
a cup of coffee and a roll, the Spanish Desayuno; 
not even an egg, nor English jam. About one or two 
o'clock in the day, they dine, having soups, meats 
(roast or boiled), fish (fresh and salt), vegetables and 
beer. At night, it is about as I have told you, and 
they often dare to add a little more cold fish and 
cheese before they finally retire. The soups at din- 
ner are very good; and the meats are better cooked 
than at a British table, on which, after a while, all 
meats begin to taste alike, and you grow tired to death 
of the eternal boiled potatoes, and boiled peas steeped 
in mint. I have had very nice cauliflower at Danish 
tables, and the lettuce of their salads is delicate and 



38 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

crisp, while the coffee of the Danes, like that of the 
Dutch, is better than you will find in either England, 
Germany or France; it seems to be the real thing, 
with neither chicory nor hidden beans. The Danes 
are skilful cooks, although their palates seem to be 
fondest of cold victuals and raw smoked fish. 

We stayed the night in a comfortable inn, close 
by the water side, an ancient ale house where sail- 
ors used to congregate in the halcyon days when 
all passing ships must lay-to at Helsinoere to pay the 
tolls then levied by the King, hard by where now the 
fishing boats tie up. There were many of these and 
one in particular was continually surrounded by an 
excited crowd. It had just arrived loaded down to 
the decks with a catch of herring. The fishermen had 
had the luck to run into one of those rare and extra- 
ordinary schools of herring which are sometimes 
chased into the protecting waters of the Sound by a 
whale or other voracious enemy outside. The nets 
had been let quickly down and millions of fish as 
quickly drawn up. The boat had been filled to sink- 
ing, and word flagged to brothers of the craft 
to hasten up and partake of the abounding catch. 
Twenty thousand dollars' worth of herring had been 
caught within a few hours by the fishermen of Hel- 
sinoere alone, to say nothing of what were taken by the 
crews of other fishing boats along the coast. The 
entire population of the little town is now busy clean- 
ing and salting fish, fish that will feed them well and 
keep them easy in stomach until the winter shall be 




A SNAP SHOT FOR A DIME, KRONBORG. 



ELSINORE AND KRONBORG. 39 

past and the spring be come again. Women were 
selling fish along the streets, boys were peddling fish, 
how many for a cent I do not know, and men were 
giving fish, gratis, to whosoever would carry them 
away. These extraordinary catches do not often 
happen. No such luck had befallen Helsinoere for 
many a day. It may be years before it again 
occurs. The fisherman of these northern waters sails 
forth upon his cmise each day inflamed with very 
much the same spirit of adventurous quest as in 
America are we who, living upon the land, drill wells 
for oil or dig for gold. 

Helsinoere is rich to-night, and the herring is her 
king. 



Across the Stsnd to Sweden and Incidents of Travel to 
KristianSa. 

Kristiania, Mission Hotel, 
PiLESTRADiET 27 (Alpheim), AuQust 31, 1902. 

Hilsen Fra Kristiania! 

Our ancient tavern, the Sleibot, in Elsinore, 
cared for us most comfortably. We were given a 
large room looking out over the waters of the Sund, 
with wide small-paned casemented windows, and a 
great porcelain stove and giant wooden bedstead. For 
breakfast we had fresh herring, the fish which will 
now form the chief diet of Helsinoere for many a 
month, and more of the good Danish coffee. The bill 
for lodging and breakfast was seven kroner (about 
$1.90) for us two. 

The dear old couple were on hand to see us off, and 
waved farvel as we boarded the immense ferry- 
boat which takes on, if needful, an entire train, but 
usually only the baggage cars, for through travel to 
Swedish and Norwegian points. The boats are long 
and wide and strong, and smash their way through the 
floes of drifting ice the winter through, for this outlet 
of the Baltic is rarely frozen solid for any length of 

(40) 




KRONBORG. 



CROSSING THE SUND TO SWEDEN. 41 

time. The four-miles passage is made in twenty 
minutes, and after we got under way, it was not 
long before even massive Kronborg faded upon the 
view, and we were making fast to the pier at Helsing- 
borg, in Sweden. 

In England, owing to the smallness of the tunnels 
and the present cost of enlarging them, the railway 
management is compelled to keep to the ancient di- 
minutive style of carriage first introduced sixty years 
ago. But here, in these northern lands, where railway 
building is of more recent date, although the gauge 
is the same as in Britain, the carriages are half as 
large again, and are many of them almost as long as 
our American cars, so that the riding in them is much 
easier than there. And in Norway I have already 
seen cars which, except for being shorter, were ex- 
actly like our own. 

We traveled first along the sea, then through 
a flat country. There were scores of sails upon the 
Kattegat, a multitude of ships and barques and 
brigs, schooners and sloops, and small fishing smacks, 
and larger fishing luggers going far out upon the 
North Sea. There were also many black hulks in tow 
of big tugs carrying coal to the Baltic cities, and 
steamers bound for English and German ports and 
even for America. The waters were alive with the 
busy traffic. 

We passed wide meadows and much grass land. 
Cows were feeding upon these fields, red cows mostly, 
with herders to watch over them. The cows were 



42 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

tethered each to a separate iron pin sunk in the 
ground, all in a single row; and thus they eat their 
way across an entire meadow, — an animated mowing 
machine. Now and then we returned to the shore of 
the sea, passing some fishing village nestled along the 
rocks, or we rolled through forests of small birches, 
pines and spruce. 

In the same compartment with ourselves sat a 
couple of young Germans. They were much inter- 
ested in each other. I noticed that the lady's rings 
were most of them shining new, and one, a large plain 
gold ring, was in look particularly recent and re- 
fulgent. H came to the same conclusion also at about 
the very same moment. The two were surely a 
bridal pair. And they talked German, and looked out 
across us through the wide windows as though we 
were never there. So I spoke to my wife in good 
United States, and we agreed that these two were 
newly wed. And then the bride's noble face and 
fine brown eyes appealed to me, and I declared her 
to be the loveliest woman I had yet seen this side 
the sea. The while she and her Mann still con- 
versed in low, soft German. But it now seemed to me 
that they looked out across us with a kindlier feeling 
in their eyes and, in a surreptitious way, the German 
beauty was peeping at the fine large diamond on H's 
left hand (the wedding ring she had already succeeded 
in making look dull and old). At Goteborg (Goth- 
enburg) our train drew up for half an hour's wait. 
Here that portion of it going to Stockholm would be 




KARL JOHANS GADE, KRISTIANIA. 



THE LOVELY GERMAN BRIDE. 43 

cut loose from our own, and another engine would take 
us to the north. Along with most of the other pas- 
sengers the young German and I also got out, leaving 
the two ladies in the ear. At the counter of the big 
lunch room I watched the ever hungry Norsemen 
stowing away cold fish and cheese, and was in some- 
what of a dilemma what to take, when the German 
husband of the lovely bride came up to me in a most 
friendly way, and suggested that I would enjoy a cer- 
tain sort of fish and thin brown cake, which seemed 
to be one of the popular objects of attack by the 
voracious multitude. And he spoke to me in perfect 
English of the educated sort. He had evidently quite 
understood my flattering comments upon his bride, 
and was now my fast friend. I did not show surprise, 
but took his hint, and afterward we strolled up and 
down the platform, munching our snack, while he 
told me that he was a "barrister from Cologne." 
**Yes, on his wedding trip." He had "learned Eng- 
lish in the German schools, ' ' he said, and had ' ' never 
been in England or America. ' ' His wife, he admitted, 
"could not speak English," but "could read it and 
understand it when others talked!" He told me of 
the German courts, and of his long years of study 
before he was admitted to the bar. When they left 
us a few miles further on, for their way lay up 
through the lakes and forests of Sweden, we parted 
as old friends, and they promised to visit us if ever 
they should come across the sea ; our unsuspecting ad- 
miration had won their hearts ! 



44 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

About 4 p. M., we dined at the small station of 
Ed, our first example of Swedish railway dinner- 
serving on an elaborate scale. The train was a long 
one. There were many passengers. The fish and 
cheese consumed at Gothenburg was long since shaken 
down. We were genuinely hungry. But when the 
train came to a stop there was no rush to the restau- 
rant, nor attempt of every man to get ahead of the 
one in front of him. The passengers took their leisure 
to get out, and walked deliberately toward the big 
eating room. The food was set upon a long central 
table. There were hot soups, hot boiled fowl, hot 
meats, an abundance of victuals, cold and salt. There 
were piles of plates, of napkins and of knives and 
forks. Everyone helped himself, and ate standing or 
carried his food to a little table and sat at ease. This 
latter plan we followed. Rule: Eat all you will, 
drink as much beer as you desire, take your own time, 
the train will wait, and when you are quite satisfied 
pay a single kroner (twenty-seven cents). There is 
no watching to see how much you may consume. You 
eat your fill, you pay the modest charge, you go your 
deliberate way. However slow you may be the train 
will wait! 

"We now traversed a barren country of marshy 
flats; with skimp timber, chiefly small birch and 
spruce. Toward dusk it was raining hard. The long 
twilight had fairly begun when we crossed the Swedish 
border and a few miles beyond stopped at Fred- 
rikshald, where is a famous fortress against the 




VEGETABLE MARKET, KRISTIANIA. 



THROUGH SWEDEN TO NORWAY. 45 

Swedes, besieging which, King Charles XII was 
killed. Here a customs' officer walked rapidly- 
through the car, asked a few questions and passed 
us on. Our trunks had been marked ** through" from 
Helsinoere, so we had no care for them until we should 
arrive in Kristiania. But that there should be still 
maintained a customs' line between the sister king- 
doms of Norway and Sweden, which are ruled by a 
common King, may perhaps surprise the stranger un- 
acquainted with the peculiar and somewhat strained 
relations ever existing between these kindred peoples. 
For many hundreds of years (since 1380) Norway 
had been a province of Denmark. Her language and 
that of the Dane had grown to be almost the same, 
the same when written and printed, and differing only 
when pronounced. But in 1814, the selfish powers of 
the Holy Alliance handed over Norway to the Swedish 
crown as punishment to Denmark for being Napo- 
leon's friend, and threatened to enforce their arbi- 
trary act by war. So Norway yielded to brute force, 
and accepted the sovereignty of Napoleon's treacher- 
ous Marshal Bernadotte, the Swedish King, but she 
yielded nothing more, and to this day has preserved 
and yet jealously maintains her own independent 
Parliament, her own postal system, her own separate 
currency and her Custom Houses along the Swedish 
line. And you never hear a Norwegian speak of any 
other than of the *'King of Sweden." "He is not 
our King," they say, **we have none." "We are 
ruled by the King of Sweden, but Norway has no 



46 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

King." Cunning Russia, it is said, cleverly spends 
many rubles in order that this independent spirit 
shall be kept awake, and the war force of Sweden 
thereby be so much weakened. Russia might even to 
this day be able to nourish into war this ancient feud 
between the kindred breeds, if it were not that in her 
greed of power she has shown the cloven foot. The 
horror of her monstrous tyranny in Finland already 
finds echo among the Norwegian mountains. "We are 
getting together, ' ' a Norwegian said to me. * ' We have 
got to get together, however jealous we may be of one 
another. We must, or else the Russian bear will hug 
us to our death, even as now he is cracking the ribs 
of helpless Finland." And when I suggested that 
little Denmark should be taken within the pale, and 
a common Scandinavian Republic be revived in more 
than ancient force to face the world, he declared that 
already a movement toward this end was set afoot, 
and only needed a favorable opportunity to become 
a living fact. 

At 11 p. M. we arrived at Kristiania in a pouring 
rain, and at General C's recommendation, came 
to this curious and comfortable hotel. Like many 
other hotels in Norway, it is kept by women, and 
seems to be much patronized by substantial Norwe- 
gians of the nicer sort. It is on the top floor of a tall 
building, and you pass up and down in a rapid modern 
elevator. It is kept as clean as a pin, and the beds 
we sleep in are the softest, freshest in mattress and 
linen we have seen this side the sea. We have also 



THE KRISTIANIA MISSION HOTEL. 47 

passed beyond the latitude of blankets and are come 
to the zone of eider down. Coverlets, light, buoyant, 
and delightfully warm now keep us from the cold, and 
in our narrow bedsteads we sleep the slumber of con- 
tented innocence. We have a large well-furnished 
chamber, all for two kroner per day (fifty-four cents). 
When we entered the long, light breakfast hall this 
morning, we saw a single table running the length 
of the room, a white cloth upon it, and ranged up 
and down, a multitude of cheeses big and little, cow 
cheese and goat cheese, and many sorts of cold meat, 
beef and pork and mutton, and cold fish and salt fish. 
And there were piles of cold sliced bread and Eng- 
lish "biscuits" (crackers). The coffee, or milk if 
you wish it, is brought in, and in our case so are 
fresh soft-boiled eggs. A group of evidently English 
folk near us had a special pot of Dundee marma- 
lade. The Norwegians take simply their coffee or 
milk, with cheese and cold fish and the cold bread. 
Our breakfast cost us twenty cents apiece. 

To-day the city is washed delightfully clean, the 
heavy rain of the night having cleared streets and 
atmosphere of every particle of dust and grime. 
We have driven all about in an open victoria. 
It is a splendid town, containing some two hun- 
dred thousand inhabitants. It lies chiefly upon a 
sloping hillside with a deep harbor at its feet. Like 
Copenhagen, it is the capital of its country, and the 
seat of the Norwegian Government, of the Supreme 
Law Courts, and of the Storthing or National Con- 



48 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

gress or Parliament. At the end of the wide Karl 
Johans Gade stands the "Palace of the Swedish 
King," a sombre edifice, now rarely occupied. Kris- 
tiania is also the literary and art center of the Norse 
people. Here Ibsen lives, here Bjoernstjoerne Bjoern- 
sen would live, if Swedish intolerance did not drive 
him into France. The types of men and women we 
see upon the streets are the finest we have met since 
coming over sea. Tall and well-built, light-haired and 
blue-eyed, the men carry themselves with great dignity. 
The women are, many of them, tall, their backs 
straight, not the curved English spine and stooping 
shoulders. All have good chins, alert and initiative. 
The Norwegians are the pick of the Scandinavian 
peoples. They are the sons and daughters of the old 
Viking breeds which led the race. They are to-day 
giving our northwestern states a population able, fear- 
less and progressive, no finer immigration coming to 
our shores. Senators and Governors of their stock are 
already making distinguished mark in American af- 
fairs. 

It was not long before we perceived that in Kris- 
tiania, as in Copenhagen, we were also very close to 
the great Republic; except that, perhaps, here we 
discovered a keener sympathy with American feeling, 
a closer touch with the American spirit. 

Those Norwegians whom we have met speak good 
United States, not modern English. You hear none of 
the English sing-song flutter of the voice, none of its 
suppression of the full-sounded consonant, but the 



KBISTIANIA, A NOBLE CITY. 49 

even, clear, precise accent and intonation of the well- 
taught American mouth. And our friends tell us that 
it is much easier for them to learn to speak the Ameri- 
can tongue than to master the often extraordinary in- 
flexion of spoken English as pronounced in Britain. 
I am gaining a great respect for these Scandinavian 
and Norwegian peoples. They are among the finest 
of the races of the European world. 

We have driven not merely through the beautiful 
city and its parks, and beheld the wide view to be had 
from the tower at its highest point, but we have also 
visited the ancient Viking ship, many years ago dis- 
covered and dug out of the sands along the sea, a 
measured model of which was so boldly sailed across 
the Atlantic, and floated on Lake Michigan, at Chi- 
cago, in 1892. 

At this time, however, we are but birds of passage 
in Kristiania. We may not linger to become more 
intimately acquainted with the noble town; we are 
arranging for a ten days' journey by boat and car- 
riage through the fjords and mountain valleys, and 
region of the mighty snow-fields and glaciers of west- 
ern Norway. We must now go on, and postpone any 
intimate knowledge of the city until another day. 

H is quite ready for this trip. She wears a cordu- 
roy shirt waist of deep purple shade, and has brought 
with her one of those short, simply-cut walking-skirts, 
of heavy cloth. A natty toque sets off her head. She 
is fitly clad. And my eyes are not the only ones that 
note this fact, as I observed to-day when, to avoid 
4 



50 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

a shower, we Bought shelter under the pillared portico 
of the Storthing's fine edifice in the central square. 
As we stood there, waiting for the rain to cease, I 
noticed a small, fair-haired, quietly-dressed woman 
intently staring at the skirt. Each hem and tuck and 
fold and crease and gore she studied with the stead- 
fast eye of the connoisseur. And so absorbed did she 
become that she grew quite oblivious of our knowledge 
of her interest. Around and around she circled, until 
at last we left her stiU taking mental notes. Some 
other woman in Kristiania, we are quite sure, will soon 
be wearing a duplicate of this well made costume from 
New York. 




HAILING OUR STEAMER, THE RAND FJORD. 



VL 

A Day Upon the Rand Fjord and Along; the Etna 
Elv — ^To Frydenlund— Ole Mon 0«r Driver. 

Frydenlund, Norge, September 1, 1902. 

We left Kristiania about seven o'clock this morn- 
ing and drove six kilometers to Grefeen, a suburb 
where the new railway comes in, which will ultimately 
connect the capital with Bergen on the west coast. 
Grefsen is up on the hills back of the city. The cars 
of the train we traveled in were long like our own 
and also set on trucks, the compartments being com- 
modious, like the one we rode in from Helsingborg. 

We traversed a country of spruce forests, rapid 
streams, small lakes and green valleys; with red- 
roofed farmsteads, cattle, sheep and horses in the 
meadows, and yellowing fields of oats and rye, just 
now being reaped; where men were driving the 
machines and women raking the fallen grain, all a 
beautiful, fertile, well-populated land with big men, 
big women, rosy and well set up, usually yellow-haired 
and blue-eyed. 

About ten o'clock we arrived at Roikenvik, on the 
Rand Fjord, a sheet of dark blue water about two 
miles wide and thirty or forty long, with high, fir- 

(51; 



52 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

clad mountains on either hand; with green slopes 
dotted with farm buildings, and occasional hamlets 
where stopped our tiny steamboat, the Oscar II. This 
fjord is more beautiful than a Scottish loch, for 
here the mountains are heavily timbered with fir to 
their very summits, while the hills of Scotland are 
bare and bleak 

We sat contentedly upon the upper deck inhaling 
the keen, fresh air, watching the picturesque pan- 
orama and noting the passengers crowded upon the 
forward deck below. They were chiefly farmers 
getting on and off, intelligent, self-respecting, well- 
appearing men, and full of good humor. One old 
gentleman with snowy whiskers, who resembled an 
ancient mariner, which I verily believe he was, seemed 
to hold the center of attention and many and loud 
were the shouts which his quaint jests brought forth. 
He evidently delivered a lecture upon my big Ameri- 
can valise, pointing to it and explaining its excellent 
make, and his remarks were apparently to the credit 
of the owner, and of America whence it came. 

Just before the bell summoned us to dinner in the 
after cabin, I noticed a skiff rowing toward us, one 
of the three men in it waving his hat eagerly to our 
Captain, who immediately stopped the boat until they 
drew beside us, when two of them, clean-cut, rosy- 
faced, young six-footers, came up, hand over hand, 
on a rope which was lowered to them. They were 
bom sailors, like all Norwegians. I snapped my kodak 
as their skiff drew near us, and the first news the 




THE OLD SALT. 



UPON THE RAND FJORD. 53 

Captain gave them was to apprise them of that fact. 
They appeared to be greatly flattered by the atten- 
tion. They laughed and bowed and looked at me as 
much as to say, "How much we should like a copy 
of the photograph, if we knew enough English to ask 
for it," but they were too diffident to make the sug- 
gestion through their Captain friend. 

With the Captain himself, I became well ac- 
quainted; an alert man of affairs, who had knocked 
about the world on Norwegian ships and visited 
the greater ports of the United States. He gave 
me an interesting account of Norse feeling at the 
time of the outbreak of the Spanish war, saying to 
me, "I am from Bergen. I am a sailor like the rest 
of our people, and with about a thousand more of my 
fellow countrymen I went over at that time to New 

York. I was boatswain on the warship and I 

served through the Spanish war. When we heard that 
there was likely to be trouble and got a hint that you 
wanted seamen, I gathered the men together and we 
went over and enlisted and others followed. Yes, there 
were several thousands of us, altogether, on your 
American warships, ready to give up our lives for 
the great Republic. Next to Norway, your great, 
free country, where already live half of the Norwegian 
race, lies closest to our hearts. We were ready to give 
up our lives for the stars and stripes. When the 
war was over most of us came back again. In the 
summer time I am captain of this boat, in the winter 
seasons I go out upon the sea. If America ever needs 



54 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

US again we are ready to help her. We Norwegians 
will fight for America whenever she calls. ' ' 

Then he spoke of Norway and the growing irritation 
of the Norwegian people against the assumptions of 
Sweden. "It is true that the Swedes are our kin, but 
we have never liked them. The Norwegians are demo- 
crats. We have manhood suffrage, and each man is 
equal before the law. In Sweden, there is a nobility 
who are privileged, and while the Swedish people sub- 
mit to the aristocrats running the Government over 
there, we Norwegians will never permit them to run us. 
If it were not for fear of Russia, we would fall apart, 
but the Russian bear is hungry. If he dared he would 
eat us up. If it were not for England he would de- 
vour Sweden now, and then there would be no hope 
for Norway. The Russian Czar wants our harbors, 
our great fjords, as havens for his fleets, and he would 
like to fill his ships with Norwegian seamen. So we 
fret and growl at Sweden, but we can't afford really 
to have trouble with her any more than she can afford 
to fall out with us. We must stand together if we 
are to maintain our national independence, but never- 
theless, we are full of fear for the future. I am ap- 
prehensive that the bear will some day satisfy his 
hunger. France will hold down Germany, who just 
now claims to be our friend also. England will be 
bought off by Russian promises in some other quarter 
of the world, and then, we shall be at the mercy of 
the Czar. God help us when that day comes ! Those 
of us who can will fly to America, all except those who 




OLE MON. 



XJPON THE RAND FJORD. 55 

die upon these mountains. The Russians may finally 
take Norway, but it will then be a devastated and de- 
peopled land. America is our foster mother. Our 
young men go to her. We are always ready to fight 
for her!" 

As I looked into his strong blue eyes, which 
gazed straight at me, I felt that the man meant 
everything he said, and was expressing not alone his 
personal sentiment, but also the feeling of the sturdy, 
seafaring people of whom he was so fit a type, and 
I wondered what the Spaniard would have thought 
if he had known when he sent his fleets across the sea 
— fleets deserted by the Scotch engineers who, in times 
of peace, had kept their engines clean — ^that the 
United States could call at need, not merely upon its 
own immense population, but might equally rely upon 
the greatest seafaring folk of all the world to fill her 
fighting ships. 

After three and a half hours ' sail — about thirty 
miles — we came to the end of the fjord at Odnaes, 
where was awaiting us a true Norwegian carriage, 
a sort of landau or trille with two bob-maned 
Norwegian ponies, in curious harness with collar and 
hames thrusting high above the neck. We had dined 
on the boat; we had only a valise, a hand-bag and 
our sea-rugs. We were soon in the carriage and be- 
gan our first day's drive, a journey of fifty-four kilo- 
meters (thirty-two miles) , before night. 

Our driver was presented to us as **01e Mon;" and 
the English-speaking owner of the carriage informed 



56 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

US that Ole ("Olie") Mon spoke fluently our tongue. 
He was a sturdily built, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed man 
some forty years of age with a gray moustache and 
smooth, weather-beaten face. He drove these tourists' 
carriages in summer, he said ; in the winter he took to 
the sea. "We soon discovered his English to be limited 
to a few simple phrases, while when he ran to the end 
of his vocabulary he never hesitated to put in a fit 
Norwegian word. He was proud of his acquaintance 
with the foreign tongue, and delighted to exercise his 
knowledge of it. His chief concern in life was to take 
care of the ponies. He continually talked to them 
as though they were his boys, and at any excuse for a 
stop, always had nosebags filled with oat meal ready 
to slip on and give them a lunch. The ponies are not 
over eight or ten hands high, but are powerfully 
muscled, and they are as sleek and tame as kittens. 
"We believe that we have a treasure in Ole Mon, and 
I expect to learn much from him about the country 
we traverse, for he is glib to talk. 

The road was superb, the scenery magnificent. We 
followed a deep fertile valley, along a roaring river, 
the Etna Elv — recent rains having filled the streams 
brim full — ^with high fir-clad mountains rising sheer 
on either hand. We climbed gradually for quite 
twenty miles, meeting and passing many curious two- 
wheeled carts, drawn by a single horse, called stolk- 
jaerres, in which the driver sits behind the passenger, 
and about four o'clock we halted at Tomlevolden, a 
rambling farmstead where Ole Mon put the nosebags 



ALONG THE ETNA ELV. 57 

on the ponies and we rested until the bags were 
emptied. 

Here, we visited a dairy cow bam, — a large airy 
building finished in planed lumber, with long rows of 
stalls where the cows face each other, standing on 
raised floors and with a wide middle aisle where the 
feeders pass down between. So scrupulously clean 
was it that each day it must be washed out and 
scrubbed. In one end stood a big stone furnace, a 
sort of oven, to keep the cattle warm through the 
dark cold winter time, and fresh spring water was 
piped to a little trough set at each stall. 

Some years ago, having spent the night at a West 
Virginia mountain farm, in middle winter, I looked 
out of the window in the morning and beheld the 
family cow with about a foot of snow piled on her 
back and belly-deep in an icy drift. I remarked, "It 
has snowed some in the night." Mine host replied 
that "he reckoned it had." And then talking of the 
snow, I told him that I had seen snow eight feet deep 
way up in Canada. He looked at me incredulously 
and inquired, "Say, what mought the cows do in such 
snow as that. ' ' Would that I might show him and his 
like this Norwegian cow bam ! 

Then we went on till 7 p. m., when we reached the 
famous Sanatorium of Tonsaasen, almost at the sum- 
mit of the long grade, a spacious wooden hotel over- 
looking a profound dal, down which plunges a cascade. 

The hotel is kept by a big, bustling woman who 
speaks perfect cockney English, and who tells us she 



58 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

has ''lived in Lonnon, although a native Norwegian." 
She wears a large white apron and a white lace cap, 
and she has received H in most motherly fashion. 
Indeed, our coming has greatly piqued her curiosity. 
She has asked us many questions and has taken H 
aside and inquired confidentially whether I am not a 
deserting soldier, and whether she is not eloping 
with me! She is evidently alert for military scandal, 
and was sorely disappointed and half incredulous 
when H declared that she and I were really man and 
wife. The truth is, Norway is become the retreat for 
so many runaway couples, recreant husbands and 
truant wives, that the good people of these caravan- 
saries are quite ready to add you to the list of shady 
episodes. Even when I boldly wrote several postal 
cards to America and handed them to mine hostess 
, to mail, I felt sure that after she had carefully read 
them she would scarcely yet believe our tale. 

Here we were given a bounteous supper of eggs, 
coffee, milk, cream, chicken, hare, trout, five sorts of 
cheese, and big hot rolls, and all for thirty-five cents 
each. The ponies were also fed again, and at eight 
o 'clock we moved on twelve miles further, crossing the 
divide and rolling down into the valley of the Baegna 
Elv in the long twilight, and then brilliant starlight, 
coming at last to a typical Norwegian inn, at Fryden- 
lund, not far from the lovely Aurdals Vand. This is 
the main road in winter between Bergen and Kris- 
tiania, and is then more traveled by sleighs and sledges 
than even now by carriages. All along the way there 




FEEDING THE PONIES, TOM LE VOLDEN. 




CHURCH OF VESTRE SLIDRE. 



TONSAASEN TO FRYDENLUND. 59 

are frequent inns and post-houses. To-morrow we 
start at eight o'clock, and go on sixty-one miles more. 
Our inn is a roomy farmhouse where "entertain- 
ment is kept," even as it used to be along the stage- 
traversed turnpikes of old Virginia, and adjoining it 
are extensive barns and stables. There seemed to be 
many travelers staying the night. We are really at 
an important point, for here two state highways sep- 
arate, the one over which we have come leading to 
Odnaes, and the other diverging southward toward 
Lake Spirillen and the country known as the Vald- 
ers, continuing on straight through to Kristiania. 
The house is painted white, and has about it an air 
quite like a farmstead in New England or New York. 
"We were expected when we arrived. "Word of our 
coming had been telephoned from Tonsaasen, and 
also from Kristiania. A large bedroom on the second 
story is given us. The floor is painted yellow and 
strips of rag carpet are laid beside the narrow bed- 
steads, where we sleep under eider down. I am writ- 
ing by the light of a home-made candle. It is late, 
the silence of the night is unbroken save by the tick- 
ing of the tall clock on the staircase landing outside 
my door, and the occasional neighing of a horse or 
lowing of a cow. It is the silence of the contented 
country-side. 



VIL 

A Drive Along; the Baegna EIv — the Auf dais Vand 
and Many More to Skogstad* 

Skogstad^ Norway, September 2, 1902. 
Here we are eighty-four kilometers (sixty-one 
miles) from Frydenlund, where we spent last night. 
All day we have sat in an easy carriage, inhaled the 
glorious buoyant air, and driven over a superb macad- 
amized road. We have skirted the shores of five 
lakes or vands — called fjords, — amidst towering snow- 
marked mountains, passing beneath cliffs rising sheer 
above us for thousands of feet, the highway sometimes 
a mere gallery cut into the solid rock, and we are now 
wondering how we were ever such simple things as 
to waste our time in tame England, or even linger 
among what now seem so commonplace, Scottish lochs 
and tarns. We have traversed the shores of the 
Aurdal, the Stranda, the Granheim, the Slidre and 
the Vangsmjoesen Fjords, each and all pools of the 
foaming river Baegna; and have looked across their 
limpid waters, their clustered islets, their shimmering 
surfaces reflecting field and forest and fjeld, and 
even portraying as in a mirror the snow-fields of 
mountain heights so far distant as to be indistin- 
guishable to the naked eye, distant yet two full days' 

(60) 



ALONG THE BAEGNA ELV. 61 

journey to the west. "We have been continually ex- 
cited and astonished as each succeeding vista of vale 
and lake and mountain has burst upon us. 

As we advanced further and further along the wide 
white military road, the valley of the Baegna Elv 
grew narrower and deeper, and the contrasts of ver- 
dant meadow and dark mountain increased in sharp- 
ness. The lower slopes are as green and well watered 
as those of Switzerland, and are dotted with farm- 
steads where the thrifty Norse farmer dwells upon 
his own land, independent, self-respecting, recog- 
nizing no lord but God — for the title of the "Swed- 
ish King" weighs but little here. Everywhere have 
I remarked a trim neatness, exceeding, if it were 
possible, even that of Holland. Upon the meadows 
were cattle, mostly red. The fields were ripe with 
rye and oats and barley where men and women were 
garnering the crops. The lands were cleared far 
up the mountain sides to where the forests of dark 
green fir stretched further up, until beyond the tim- 
ber-line bare black rock masses played hide and seek 
among the clouds. 

Back and beyond this splendid panorama of vale 
and lake and cloud-wrapped summit, far beyond it, 
binding the horizon on the west, there grew upon our 
vision all the afternoon enormous heights of stern 
and austere mountains, lifting themselves into the 
very zenith, their slopes gleaming with white bands 
of snow, their topmost clefts nursing glittering ice- 
packs and glaciers. Ole Mon has constantly pointed 



62 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

toward them saying "Totunheim!" "Yotunheim!'* 
and we have known them to be the gigantic ice-bound 
highlands of the celebrated Jotunheim Alps, the lofti- 
est snow mountains of Norway. 

"We left the inn at Frydenlund after a breakfast of 
brook trout, fried to a turn, and all we could eat of 
them, delicious milk like that from our blue grass 
counties of Greenbrier and Monroe, in "West Virginia, 
and coffee made as only an Americanized Norwegian 
may know how. 

Along the way we have met children evidently 
going to and returning from their schools, and it 
has been charming to see how the little boys pull 
off their caps, and the little girls drop down in a 
courtesy. The little caps always come off the yellow 
heads with sweeping bow, and the duck of the little 
girls is always accompanied by a smile of greeting. 
I regret that in America we have lost these pretty 
customs which were once taught as good manners by 
our forebears. 

"We have passed this morning a frowning stone 
jail, the prison of this province, and Ole Mon tells us 
that it is quite empty and has had no tenant for some 
two years; surely, convincing testimony of the in- 
nate honesty of these sturdy folk. 

"We have also to-day met many young men, tall and 
stalwart, clad in the dark blue uniform of the Nor- 
wegian National Guard. This is the season when the 




A HERD OF COWS, FOSHEIM. 




THE GRANHEIMS VAND. 



LOEKEN UPON THE SLAEDRE VAND. 63 

annual drills are going on, just at the end of the 
harvest time. Norway, like the rest of Europe, has 
adopted universal military training for her men. 
They are taught the art of war and how to shoot. It 
is calculated that in eight or ten years more every 
Norwegian of voting age will have had the necessary 
military training and will have become a part of the 
effective national defense. **We will never have 
trouble with Sweden,*' they say, "the Swedes and 
ourselves only show our teeth. " * * It is Russia, hungry 
Russia, that we fear. We will learn to march and 
shoot and dig entrenchments so that we may defend 
ourselves against the aggression of the Slav. Upon 
the sea, we are the masters. We learn in your navy 
how to handle modern warships and shoot the giant 
guns. Upon these mountains, we hope, ere another 
decade has elapsed, also to be safe against the en- 
croachment of that 'Great White peril.' " 

We stopped for our first pony-feed at Fagernaes, 
where a road turns off to Lake Bygdin and its Elv, 
where the English go to fish; halted a half hour 
at Fosheim, where is a fine hotel, and then, passing 
the ancient stone church of Vestre Slidre, drove 
on to Loeken, where a reindeer-steak-and-salmon- 
trout-dinner awaited us. The inn, situated on a rocky 
point overlooking the picturesque Slidre Vand, was 
quakerly-clean, as all of these places are. The neatly 
dressed young woman who waited on us had lived two 
years in Dakota, and in Spokane, and spoke perfect 
United States. She had an uncle and a brother still 



64 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

there, and hoped to go back herself when the old folks 
had passed away. At Oeilo, fifteen kilometers further 
on, we also drew rein — each time we stop the ponies 
have the nosebags of oat meal — and then we paused 
again at Grindaheim at the Vang Hotel, close to the 
shores of the Vangsmjoesen Vand. Here the mistress 
of the inn had lived in Minnesota, and talked with us 
like one of our own countrywomen. She had come 
home on a little visit, she said. A stalwart Norseman 
had lost his heart and won her hand, and saved-up 
dollars — but yet her spirit longed for free America. 
Her boys would go there as soon as they were big 
enough to hustle for themselves. 

In the dining room of the comfortable house was 
gathered a collection of stuffed and mounted birds 
of the surrounding countryside. There were several 
ptarmigan and one fine capercailzie, the cousin to the 
black cock, and the biggest thing of the pheasant- 
kind that flies in Northern Europe. 

Our Minnesotan hostess pressed us to stay and tarry 
a few days, setting before us a big pitcher of milk 
and little caraway-seed-flavored tea cakes, all for the 
price of Te Oere, two and a half cents. We would 
like to have lingered here, for the house is nestled in 
one of the wildest and loveliest of dales. To the 
north, a mile across the vand, tower the black precip- 
itous heights of the giant Skodshorn (5,310 feet) 
upon whose cloud-capped peaks, Ole Mon tells us, the 
ghosts of the ancient Scalds and Vikings meet in 
berserker combat with Thor and Odin, and whence, 




A HAMLET BENEATH THE FJELD. 



THE LEGEND OF THE SKODSHORN. 65 

sometimes, when the air is still and there are no 
storms about, the clangs and clashes of their battle 
conflicts resound with thunder roars, waking the 
echoes in all the valleys round. Then the black 
mountain sides breathe forth gigantic jets of steam- 
like cloud, while it is at such times also that the Trolls 
and Gnomes creep forth from the shadows of the rocks 
to do honor to the warring giants. When questioned 
closely, he admitted he had never witnessed one of 
these combats, but declared that when a boy he had 
heard the roar on the summit of the mountain and 
had seen the white clouds shoot up, which is always 
the sign of victory for the gods. Our hostess also as- 
serted that she had once heard the mountain roar, but 
admitted she had not seen the shooting clouds. Some 
scientists try to explain the mountain's action accord- 
ing to natural laws, but so great is my faith in Ole 
Mon that I dare not dispute his word. Back of the 
little inn also rise the lofty masses of the Grinde 
Fjeld (5,620 feet) upon whose moorland summits 
it is, the capercailzie fly and the herds of reindeer 
range, whence came the juicy steaks we ate to-day at 
Loeken and have had to-night for supper. 

All along the Baegna valley, including the fertile 
basins wherein nestle the many vands or lesser 
fjords, there were men and women in the fields 
mowing the short grass and ripening grain. But 
neither the grasses, nor the rye and oats and barley 
had reached maturity. Nor do they ever fully ripen 
in these cold latitudes. They must be cut green, and 
5 



66 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

then the feeble sunshine must be made the most of. 
Long ricks, made of sticks and saplings, or poles 
barred with cross-pieces set on at intervals are built 
extending through the fields, and on these the grass 
and grain are carefully spread out, hung on a handful 
at a time, so that each blade and straw may catch the 
sun, and dry out, a tedious, laborious work on which 
the women were more generally employed. The men 
bring up back-loads newly cut by scythe and sickle, 
and throw them down before the women, who then care- 
fully hang each handful on the ricks. What must a 
Norwegian feel, trained to such painstaking toil as 
this, when he at first sets foot upon the boundless 
wheat lands of Minnesota and the prairie "West. No 
wonder he returns to his native homestead only to 
make a hasty visit, never to remain. In Switzerland, 
I also saw the grass cut when scarcely half ripe and 
but a few inches high, when it is stored in handy 
little log cribs where in the course of time it slowly 
dries out, but here every blade must be hung up in 
the sun and air if it shall turn to hay. When the 
hay and grain is fully dried, it is taken down and 
done up into loosely bound sheaves, or carried in 
bulk to the large, roomy barns. The grain is generally 
thrashed out with flails, I am told, although a few 
American machines are now being introduced. 

The wire fence is not yet come into Norway, al- 
though timber is remote and costly, and the people 
are hard put to it for fencing material. I noticed that 
they generally depend upon slim poles and small 




RICKING THE RYE. 




THE AUTHOR BY THE SLIDRE VAND. 



THE NIGHT AT SKOGSTAD. 67 

saplings loosely strung together, for English hedges 
cannot be grown in these chilly northlands. 

And now we are at Skogstad, above the Vangsmjoes- 
en Vand and lesser Strande Vand, with two or more 
vands to see to-morrow before we cross the height of 
land and come down to Laerdalsoeren, on the Sogne 
Fjord which holds the waters of the sea, sixty-five 
miles further on. The vands to-day have been like 
giant steps, each emptying into the one below by the 
roaring river, mounting up, each smaller than the 
one below and more pent in by towering mountain 
masses. 

H is now tucked in between mattress and coverlet 
of eider down — we are beyond the latitude of blankets 
— in a narrow bed, and I am about to get into an- 
other on the other side of the room, on which I now 
sit writing to you by the light of a sperm candle, 
while the murmur of a thousand cascades tinkles in 
my ears. 



VIE, 

Over the Height of Land — A Wonder f«I Ride Down 
the Laera Dal to the Sogne Fjord. 

Laerdalsoeren, Norge, September 3, 1902. 

We left Skogstad early and began to climb a long 
ascent, a dozen miles of grade, still following the valley 
of the Baegna Elv foaming and tossing by our side. 
The two days so far had been clear and cloudless, but 
now the air was full of a fine mist, and we probably 
ascended a thousand feet before the curtain lifted 
and a panorama of snow-capped mountains, profound 
valleys, and sheer precipices burst upon us. 

A thousand rills and rivulets and brawling brooks 
streaked the green slopes with threads and lines of 
white; mosses and lichens softened the black rock- 
masses; blooming heather, and a plant with fine red 
and yellow leaf gave color to the heights between the 
sombre greenness of the fir forests below and the 
whiteness of the snow-fields above. I have never be- 
fore seen such stupendous precipices, such tremend- 
ous heights; neither Switzerland nor Mexico, Alps 
nor Cordilleras lift themselves in so precipitous as- 
cent. 

After a two hours' climb, all the way listening to 
the roar of the Elv choking the gorge a thousand feet 

(68-) 



CROSSING HEIGHT OF LAND ABOVE NYSTUEN. G9 

below our way, we met its waters issuing quietly from 
yet another lake, the little Utro Vand, surrounded by 
snow-crowned summits, the snow-fields creeping al- 
most to the water's edge, also passing on our right, the 
road which leads to the Tyin Vand and the ice-crowned 
summits of the Jotunheim. Here was a large and com- 
fortable inn, Nystuen by name, and Ole Mon gave the 
ponies their first morning's feed, adding an armful of 
mountain hay to the oatmeal diet. Half an hour's 
rest is the usual limit, and the ponies seem to know 
their business and eat their fare on time. In Mexico, 
horses are fed grain but once in twenty-four hours, 
and that at midnight, so that all hearty food will be 
digested before the early morning start. Here a horse 
is kept full all the time to do his best; difference of 
climate and latitude, I suppose. 

Just beyond the Nystuen Vand, we crossed the 
height of land between the waters of east and west 
Norway, and now the streams were running the other 
way. We were up 3,294 feet, and the summits round 
about us — rising yet two and three thousand feet 
higher — were deeply snow-marked — great patches 
and fields of snow. Then we came to another succes- 
sion of four more vands, like steps, each bigger than 
the one above it, and a roaring river that proportion- 
ately grew in size. The road became steeper and 
we fairly scampered down to a fine inn, painted 
red with curiously-carven Norse ornamentation on 
the gables, called Maristuen. Here we had fresh sal- 
mon, and more good coffee. For breakfast we were 



70 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

given trout and eggs, now salmon and a delicious 
custard for dessert. At table we met a Mr. C and 
wife, of Chicago, going over our trail, and we may 
meet them again in Stockholm. They are anxious to 
go on to Russia after seeing Stockholm, and have 
urged us to go along also. Across the table from us sat 
a dear old white-haired grandmother from Bergen 
with a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired granddaughter — a 
Viking Juno. They are driving across to Odnaes in 
their own carriage, a curious, old-fashioned trille, 
low and comfortable with a mighty top. The old lady 
is stacked up between pillows of eider down, and the 
blue-eyed granddaughter is full of tender care. We 
spake not to them nor they to us, but we smiled at 
one another and that made us friends. They both 
waved farvel as they drove away. 

And then, about two o'clock, we went on again 
for forty miles down to the level of Laerdalsoeren and 
the sea, on the Sogne Fjord, where now we are. We 
were to descend some 3,000 feet, and here began one 
of the most exciting experiences of my life. The 
mountains kept their heights; we alone came lower, 
all down a single dal. Most of the road was hewn 
out of the side of precipices — a gallery ; great stones 
were set endwise about two feet apart on the outer 
edge, and sometimes bound together by an iron rail; 
a slope down which we rolled at a flying trot, coasted 
down — ^the roaring, foaming river below, far below. 
Close to us were falls and cascades and cataracts, and 
the stupendous mountains, the snow-capped rock- 




THREE THOUSAND FEET OF WATERFALL. 



COASTING DOWN THE LAERA DAL. 71 

masses lifting straight up thousands of feet. H grew 
so excited, exclaiming over the mighty vistas of rock 
and water and distant valley, that I had fairly to 
hold her in; and ever we rolled down and down and 
down, spanking along with never a pause for nearly 
thirty miles, the spinning wheels never once catching 
the ponies' flying heels. Great driving that of Ole 
Mon, great speeding that of the sturdy ponies; mar- 
velous macadamized roadway, smooth as New York's 
Fifth Avenue! Water bursts, misty cascades, de- 
scending hundreds of feet, sprayed us, splashed us, 
dashed us, as we went on and on and on, only the 
gigantic precipices growing higher and higher and 
higher, and the ever-present snowy summits more and 
more supreme above us. 

Then we swept out into a green valley, hemmed in 
on either hand by sombre precipices rising straight up 
for three and four and five thousand feet, and hove to 
at the farmstead of Kvamme for the ponies to be 
fed once more before their last descent. A mile or 
two further on the precipices choke together forming 
a deep gorge, called the Vindhelle, where it looks 
as though the mountains had been cracked apart. 

The Norwegian farmer, like the Swiss, not only 
makes his living from the warm bottom-lands, which 
he cultivates, but also from the colder uplands to 
which his goats and cattle are driven in the early 
summer, and where the surplus grasses are painstak- 
ingly gathered with the sickle. We were driving 
quietly along when my attention was attracted to a 



72 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

couple of women standing with pitchforks in their 
hands near a cock of hay. The hay was fresh mown, 
but I could see no hay-fields round about. They were 
looking intently at the distant summit of the preci- 
pice towering above them. My eye followed theirs. 
I could barely make out a group of men shoving a 
mass of something over the edge, and then I beheld 
the curious sight of a haymow flying through the air. 
Nearer it came, and nearer until it landed at the 
women's feet. I then made out a wire line connecting 
a windlass set in the ground near where the women 
stood and reaching up to the precipice's verge, whence 
came the hay. The hay was wound about this line. 
In this manner is the hay crop of these distant up- 
lands safely delivered at the little gaard or farmstead 
in the valley's lap. From these mountain altitudes 
the milk and cheese and butter which the goats and 
cows afford are also sometimes lowered by this tele- 
graph. In Switzerland, I have seen communications 
of this sort for shorter distances, but never before be- 
held a stack of hay flying through the air for half a 
mile. 

This Laera River with its dal (dale, valley), is 
famous for its trout and salmon. "We passed several 
men and boys trying their luck, one, an Englishman, 
up to his waist in the ice-cold tide. We have now put 
up at a snug hotel, quite modern; English is spoken 
here. And — ^but I forgot; when we stopped to feed 
the ponies, right between the two descents, we made 
solemn friendship with the old Norseman who here 



THE PRETTY LASS OF BORGUND. 73 

keeps the roadhouse; his daughter "had been in Chi- 
cago," she spoke perfect United States, and took xm 
to see, hard by, the most ancient church in Nor- 
way, the church of Borgund, eight hundred to one 
thousand years old. It is very quaint, with strange 
Norse carving and Runic inscriptions. I gave our 
pretty guide a kroner for her pains. On returning to 
the house, she handed it to the old man, who took out 
a big leathern wallet and put the coin away. "We had 
meant it all for her, and by reason of her knowing 
Chicago had made the fee quite double size. 

To-morrow we sail for six hours out upon the Sogne 
Fjord to Gutvangen, then drive by carriage to Eida, 
on the Hardanger Fjord, all yet among these stu- 
pendous mountains. 

I was sitting in the little front room of the inn 
waiting for supper, when our driver, Ole Mon, came 
in to settle our account, for his trip was at an end. 
After I had paid him and added a few oeres and a 
kroner for trinkgeld, at the liberality of which he 
seemed to be much gratified, he produced from the 
inner pocket of his coat a goodly-sized blank book, 
which he handed to me, and begged that I would set 
down therein a recommendation of his qualities as a 
driver and a guide. In the book were already a num- 
ber of brief statements in French and German and 
Norwegian, by different travelers, declaring him to 
be a "safe and reliable man," who had "brought 
them to their journey's end without mishap." I 
took the book and wrote down some hurried lines. 



74 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

When I had finished, he gazed upon the foreign writ- 
ing and then disappeared with the book into the 
kitchen to consult the cook, who had lived in Minne- 
apolis. He presently reappeared, his eyes big with 
wonder and a manner of profound deference. He 
now advised me that he would deem it a great honor 
to be permitted to drive us free of charge, next morn- 
ing, from the hotel to the steamer, a couple of miles 
distant. He further said, that he had decided to 
take the sea trip to Gutvangen on our ship and 
would there secure for us the best carriage and driver 
of the place. He evidently regarded me as some 
famous bard, to whom it would be difficult to do suf- 
ficient honor. The lines were these : 

Aye! Ole Mon, you are a dandy whip, 

You are a corker and a daisy guide. 
You talk our tongue and rarely make a slip. 

You've taken us a stunner of a ride. 
And when from Norge's fields and fjords we sail. 

And in America tell of what we've seen, 
Our friends will stand astonished at the tale. 

And next year bid you take them where we've been. 



IX. 

A Day Upon the Sogne Fjord. 

Stalheim Hotel, Norway, September 4, 1902. 
To-day we have spent mostly on the water. "We left 
Laerdalsoeren — the mouth of the valley of the river 
Laera — by ship, a tiny ship, deep-hulled and built 
to brave the fiercest gales, a boat of eighty to one 
hundred tons. Casting off from the little pier at eight 
o'clock, we were upon the waters of the majestic Sogne 
Fjord until after 3 p. m. This great fjord is the 
first body of water that I have seen which to my mind 
is really a fjord, the others along the shores of 
which we have journeyed for the past three days, in- 
cluding the last and least, the Smidal and the 
Bruce Fjords, were only mountain tarns, what 
in Norse speech is termed a "Vand." While I had 
read much of fjords, never till to-day have I compre- 
hended their marvelous grandeur, the overwhelming 
magnitude of the earth's convulsions which eons ago 
cracked open their tremendous depths and heights. 
Although their bottoms lie deeper than the bottom of 
the sea, (4,000 feet deep in some places), so the Captain 
tells me, yet up out of these profound waters rise the 
gigantic mountains (fjeld) five and six thousand 
feet into the blue sky, straight up as it were, with 

C75) 



76 THROUGH 8CANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

hundreds of cascades and foaming waterfalls, some- 
times the tempestuous tides of veritable rivers, leap- 
ing down the black rocks and splashing into space, 
and everywhere above them all are the snow-fields, 
the eternal snow-fields. 

Sometimes when the precipices are sheltered and 
sun-warmed, their surface is green with mosses and 
banded with yellow gorse, and with white and pink 
and purple heather, and barred with scarlet and gray 
lichens. The waters were so deep, the precipices so 
sheer that often our ship sailed not more than twenty 
or thirty feet distant from them; the misty spray of 
the streams dissolving into impalpable dust hundreds 
of feet above us, dampening us like rain, or wind- 
blown, flying away in clouds of vaporous smoke. 

Here and there along the more open parts of the 
fjord were bits of green slope with snug farmsteads, 
a fishing boat swinging to a tiny pier or tied to 
the very house itself. Sometimes, perched on a 
rocky shelf, grass-grown and high-up a thousand 
feet, we would discern a clinging cabin, and once we 
espied a grazing cow that seemed to be hanging in 
mid air. No patch of land lay anywhere about that 
was not dwelt upon, tilled or grazed by some man or 
beast. The climate of western Norway is mild and 
humid, tempered as it is by the Gulf Stream. These 
coasts have always been well peopled, sea and soil 
yielding abundant living to the hardy Norsk. The 
fjords are the public highways and upon their ice- 
free waters vigorous little steamships ply back and 



A DAY UPON THE SOGNE FJORD. 77 

forth busied with incessant traffic through all the 
year. Our course led us up many winding arms and 
watery lanes to cozy hamlets nestled at the mouth of 
some verdant dal, where we would lie-to a few 
minutes to put off and take on passengers and freight. 
We also carried the mails. At each stopping-place the 
ship's mate would hand out the bags to the waiting 
official, often an old man, more generally a rosy- 
cheeked young woman, and carefully take a written 
memorandum of receipt, when bag and maiden and 
many of the waiting crowd would disappear. Once 
or twice the bags were loaded upon one of the 
curious two-wheeled carts called stolkjaerres driven 
by a husky boy, when cart and horse and boy at once 
set off at lively gallop. In winter time sledges and 
men on skjis replace the handy stolkjaerre, and thus 
all through the year are the mails efficiently dis- 
tributed. The captain tells me that a great proportion 
of the letters received and sent are from and to 
America, where so many of Norway's most energetic 
and capable young men are growing rich, and that a 
large proportion of these letters received are regis- 
tered, and contain cash or money orders remitted to 
the families at home. What wonder is it that these 
thousand white-winged missives, which continually 
cross the sea, have made and are now making the 
ancient Kingdom almost a Democratic state! At one 
of these hamlets, Aurland by name, I caught with 
my camera a pretty Norwegian lass in full native 
costume, such as has been worn from time immemorial 



78 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

by the women of the Sogne Fjord, — a charming pic- 
ture. 

Toward three o'clock we sailed up a shadowy can- 
yon, the Naeroe Fjord, under mighty overhanging 
precipices, arriving at Gudvangen, our voyage's end. 
Here carriages awaited us and here Ole Mon, who has 
sailed with us throughout the day, after having driven 
us down to the boat himself and refused all pay, 
handed us over to the driver of the best vogn 
(wagon) of the lot, with evidently very particular in- 
structions as to our welfare. In fact, H tells me, Ole 
Mon has spent the day with his book of recommenda- 
tion open in his hand, calling the world's attention to 
my glowing rhymes, and pointing me out with an air 
of profound deference as an illustrious, although to 
him unknown, bard. We bid him farvel, with real 
sorrow, and regretted that he might not have driven 
us to the very end. 

We now went on ten kilometers through a narrow 
clove, between enormous heights, passing the Jordals- 
nut, towering above us, straight up more than three 
thousand feet, and straining our necks to peer up at 
the foaming torrent of the Kilefos leaping two thou- 
sand feet seemingly at a single bound, and almost 
wetting us with its flying spray. At one place the 
road is diverted, and the immense mountain is scarred 
from the very edge of the snows by the marring rifts 
of a recent avalanche, which, our driver says, was the 
most tremendous fall of snow and ice these parts have 
ever known. At last we began a steep zigzag ascent, 




SUDALS GATE ON THE SOGNE FJORD. 



A DAY UPON THE SOGNE FJORD. 79 

SO sharp that even H relieved the ponies of her 
weight. "We were an hour in climbing the twelve 
hundred feet; and found ourselves on a wide 
bench overlooking the wild and lovely Naeroedal up 
which we had come. The sun was behind us, the half 
shadows of approaching twilight were creeping out 
from each dell and crevice. Upon our left, the gray- 
peak of the Jordalsnut yet caught the sunshine, as also 
did the snow-fields of the Kaldaf jeld, almost as lofty 
upon our right. The Naeroedal was filling with the 
mysterious haziness of the northern eventime. Be- 
hind us, conunanding this exquisite vista, we found a 
monstrous and uncouth edifice, a German enterprise, 
the Stalheim Hotel, thrust out upon a rocky plat- 
form between two rivers plunging down on either 
side. Here we have been given a modern bedroom, 
fitted with American-looking oak furniture, have en- 
joyed a well-cooked German supper, sat by a blazing 
wood fire, and shall soon turn off the electric lights 
and turn in, to repose on a wire mattress, and be 
lulled to sleep by the musical roar of the two great 
waterfalls. 



X. 

From Stalheim to Eida — The Waterfall of Skjerve 
Fos — The Mighty Hardanget Fjord. 

Odda, Norway, September 5, 1902. 

We left Stalheim by Skyd (carriage), at nine 
o'clock. The drive was up a desolate valley, through 
a scattering woodland of small firs and birches, close 
by the side of a foaming creek, the Naerodals Elv, 
hundreds of becks and brooklets bounding down the 
mountain sides to right and left. 

After an hour's climb, we reached a flattened sum- 
mit where lay a little lake, the Opheims Vand, two or 
three miles long and wide, encircled with snow-fields. 
Here and there we passed a scattered farmstead — 
gaard — for every bit of land yielding any grass is 
here in the possession of an immemorial owner. The 
vand is a famed trout pool, and as we wound along 
its shores we passed any number of men and boys 
trying their luck. It was raining steadily, a cold fine 
downpour, and all the male population seemed to 
have taken to the rod. 

At the lake's far end we passed a small hotel, built 
in Norse style with carved and ornamented gables 
and painted a light green. Here in the season the 
English come to fish. 

(80) 




THE NAERO DAL. 



STAL5EIM TO VOSSVANGEN. 81 

' Leaving the vand, we began a long descent, and for 
twelve miles rolled down at a spanking pace, the 
brook by our side steadily growing until it at last be- 
came a huge and violent torrent, a furious river, the 
Tvinde Elv. In the fourteen miles we had de- 
scended — coasted — ^two thousand five hundred (2,500) 
feet, and now were come to the little town of Voss or 
Vossvangen, which lies on the banks of the Vangs 
Vand, a body of blue water five or six miles long and 
two miles wide, surrounded by one of the most fertile, 
well-cultivated valleys of Norway. 

Vossvangen is a town of importance, and is the 
terminus of the railway with which the Norwegian 
government is connecting Bergen and Kristiania. 
The easiest parts of this national railway, those be- 
tween Bergen and Vossvangen, and between Kristiania 
and Eoikenvik — over which we came — are already 
constructed and running trains, but it is estimated 
that it will be twenty years before the connecting link 
is finally completed, for it is almost a continuous 
tunnel — a magnificent piece of railroad-making when 
it is done. 

Vossvangen is also the birthplace of one of Minne- 
sota's most illustrious sons, United States Senator 
Knute Nelson. It is upon these mountains that he 
tended the goats and cows when a barefooted urchin, 
and I do not doubt that he has surreptitiously pulled 
many a fine trout and salmon out of the lovely lake. 
The people of Vossvangen accept his honors as partly 

6 



82 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

their own, and my Norwegian host gazed at me most 
complacently when I told him that American Sena- 
tors held in their hands more power and were bigger 
men than any Swedish King. Norwegians are justly 
proud of their eminent sons who, in the great Repub- 
lic over the sea, are so splendidly demonstrating the 
capability of the Norse race. 

"We put up at a modem-looking inn, called Fleisch- 
er's Hotel, a favorite rendezvous for the English, 
despite its German-sounding name. Here we rested 
a couple of hours, and were given a well-served din- 
ner with tender mutton and baked potatoes, big and 
mealy, which we ate with a little salt and abundance 
of delicious cream. Our hearts were here stirred 
with sympathy for a most unhappy-looking American 
girl who had evidently married a foreign husband. 
He was a surly, ugly-mannered man, with low brows 
and tangled black hair. She, poor thing, was the 
picture of despair, her fate being that all too common 
one of the American woman who, foolishly dazzled 
with a titled lover, too late finds him to be a titled 
brute. 

"We were to continue to Eida on the Hardanger 
Fjord, in the same carriage in which we set out. The 
ponies were well rested, and we got away a little after 
two o'clock. Ascending the well-tilled valley of the 
Rundals Elv by easy grades over a fine hard road, we 
crossed a marshy divide and then descended to the 
Hardanger Fjord. After passing the divide and com- 
ing down a few miles, we suddenly found ourselves 




GREETING OUR BOAT, AURLAND. 



I 



THE ROARING SKJERVEFOS. 83 

on the rim of a vast amphitheatre into the center 
of which plunged a mighty waterfall, the Skjervefos, 
much resembling that of the Kaaterskill Falls, in the 
Catskill mountains of New York, only ten times as big. 
A roaring river here jumps sheer a thousand feet, and 
then again five hundred more. Yet we did not know 
of it until we were right on to it and into it. The falls 
making two great leaps, the road crosses the wild 
white waters between them on a wooden bridge. Over 
this we drove through soaking clouds of spray. 

When in London we had no thought of Norway. 
Not until we heard from General and Mrs. C of 
the delights of this journey did we make up our minds 
to take it. We were then in Copenhagen, and neither 
in that town nor in Kristiania have we been able to 
get hold of an English-worded guide book. We are 
trusting to our driver's knowledge, and to our own 
eyes and wits. And so it is, that we came right upon 
one of the most splendid waterfalls in all Norway, and 
never knew aught of it until chasm and flood opened 
at our feet. Perhaps it is better so. We have no ex- 
pectations, our eyes are perpetually strained for the 
next turn in the road, our ears are alert for the thun- 
dering of cascades, our minds are open for astonish- 
ment and delight. 

While it is a substantial modern bridge that now 
takes you safely over the stream which spins and 
spumes between the upper and the nether falls, yet 
our driver tells us, that in the ancient days when 
■men and beasts must ford or swim to get across, this 



84 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

was dreaded as a most dangerous place. Few dared 
to ford, — ^most made a long detour. No matter how 
quiet or how low the waters might appear, there were 
yet dangers which men could not see, for water- 
demons hid in the black eddies and skulked in the 
foam. They lurked in silence until the traveler was 
midway the stream when they would boldly seize him 
by the feet, and draw him down, and ride his body 
exultingly through the plunging cataract below, nor 
did they fear also to drown what rescuer might venture 
in to save his friend. When now the moon is low and 
the night is still, may frequently be heard commin- 
gling with the leaping waters' roar, 'tis said, the death 
wails of the lost souls of those whom the demons thus 
have drowned and delivered for torment to the cruel 
master-demon, Niki. 

Below the giant Skjervefos we rolled alongside 
its Elv until we came out upon the margin of another 
exquisite tarn, the Gravens Vand, where, just as 
along the Vangsmjoesen Vand, the roadway is, much 
of it, hewn out in galleries at the base of over- 
hanging cliffs. Nor is there room for carriages to 
pass. There are turnouts, here and there, and you 
pull a rope and ring a bell which warns ahead that 
you are coming. In some places the roadway was 
shored up with timbers above the profound black 
waters. "We passed from the vand through a rocky 
glen down which the foaming waters hurried to the 
sea. We followed the stream and suddenly came 
out into vast breadth and distance. We were at Eida 



THE MIGHTY HARDANGEB FJORD. 85 

on an arm of the mighty Hardanger Fjord, the biggest 
earth crack in Norway. 

A fresh, keen wind blew up from the ocean. A 
wooden pier jutted out into the deep water, where, 
tied to it, were several fishing smacks. A small, 
black-hulled steamer was there taking on freight, but 
it was not our boat. The sky was overcast. The 
long twilight was coming to an end. It would soon be 
dark. Across the fjord, giant black-faced precipices 
lifted up into the clouds and snows. Down the fjord 
misty headlands loomed against the dusk. The black 
waters were foam capped. There was a dull moan to 
the wind in the offing; it was a night for a storm at 
sea. It now grew dark. A few fitful stars shone here 
and there. The wind was rising. A bright light 
suddenly appeared toward the west. Our boat had 
come round the headland, and was soon at the pier. 
It was much like the little ship in which we sailed 
upon the Sogne Fjord. These fjords are alive with 
multitudes of just such boats, deep-set, sturdy craft, 
built to brave all weathers and all seas. Our course 
lay down the Graven Fjord, through the Uten 
Fjord, and then up the long, narrow Soer Fjord — 
arms of the Hardanger — to the hamlet of Odda, where 
we would again take a carriage and cross the snow- 
fields of the giant Haukeli mountains of the Western 
Alps. 

Watching the sullen waters, profound and myste- 
rious, as they churned into a white wake behind our 
little craft, I could scarcely credit it that I was upon 



86 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

the Hardanger Fjord, the greatest and most intricate 
of the sheltered harbors which for centuries have 
made the coasts of Norway the fisherman's haven, the 
pirate's home. Upon these waters the ancient Viking 
learned his amphibious trade. Hid in the coves 
which nestle everywhere along the bases of the 
precipices the Viking mothers hatched and reared 
their broods of sea-urchins, who romped with the 
seals and chased the mermaids and frolicked with the 
storms. Where I now sailed had met together again 
and again those fleets of war-boats, the like of which 
we saw the other day in Kristiania, and which went 
out to plunder and ravage hamlet and town and city 
along all the ocean coasts, even passing through the 
Gates of Hercules, and visiting Latin and Greek 
and African province with devastation and death. 
" Sea- wolves, " Tacitus called them, and such they 
were. Here gathered the hardy war-men who went 
out and conquered Gaul, and founded Norse rule 
in Normanwise where now is Normandy. Hence 
sailed forth the warships which harried the Brit- 
ish Isles, and left Norse speech strong to this day on 
Scottish tongue and in Northumbrian mouth. Here, 
also, fitted out the ships, some of the crews of which 
it may have been who left their marks upon the New 
Jersey shores in Vineland, and who may even have 
been the sires of that strange blue-eyed, light-haired, 
unconquered race I saw two years ago in Yucatan, 
who have held the Spaniards these four centuries 
in check. I gazed upon the black waters of mighty 



THE VOYAGE TO ODDA. 87 

Hardanger, and saw the fleets returning with their 
spoil, and heard the shouts of vengeance wreaked 
and victory won, which have so often echoed among 
these mountains. I was looking upon the breeding, 
homing waters of the greatest sea-race the world has 
known, and every lapping wavelet became instinct 
with the mystery of the cruel, splendid past. 

The churning of the propeller blades now ceased. 
I felt a jarring of the boat. We were come to Odda 
and the voyage's end. 

It was ten o 'clock when we made our port. A black 
night it had been, pitch dark, with a fierce wind and 
ill-tempered sea. The profound waters respond with 
sullen restlessness to the stress of outer tempest. Only 
a Norseman born and bred to these tortuous chan- 
nels could have safely navigated them on such a 
night, and I noticed that our engines did not once 
slacken speed throughout the voyage ! 

Upon arriving at our hotel we found we were ex- 
pected. A comfortable room was in readiness, and a 
carriage engaged for the following day and early 
breakfast arranged. All this had been done through 
telephone by our Tourists' Agency (the Bennetts) 
in Kristiania. And so have we found it every- 
where along our route. All Norway, every post office 
and nearly every farm, and especially all hotels and 
inns, are connected by a telephone system owned and 
run by the Government. Anybody in Norway can 
call up and talk to anybody else. We have experi- 
enced the full benefit of this efficiency. 



88 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

Our entire trip has been arranged by telephone 
from Kristiania. "We are always expected. A deli- 
cious meal, ordered from Kristiania, is always ready 
for us, and every landlord knows to the minute just 
when we will arrive, for news of us has been 'phoned 
ahead from the last station we have passed. 

This hamlet of Odda is an important point. Here 
converge the two great trade and tourist routes of 
Western Norway. The one, the Telemarken route, 
crossing the Haukeli Fjeld of the Western Alps 
to Dalen, and thence by the Telemarken lakes and 
locks to Skien, and by rail to Kristiania; the other 
diverging at Horre, passing down the valley of the 
Roldals Vand to Sand and thence to Staavanger by 
the sea, whence ships cross to Hamburg and Bremen 
and the North Sea ports, and to Hull and Harwich in 
Britain — favorite routes by which the Germans and 
British enter Norway. 



XL 

The Buarbrac and Folgefonden Glaciers — Cataracts 
and Mountain Tatns — Odda to Horte. 

HoRRE, Hotel Breifond, September 6, 1902. 

To-day we have driven thirty miles from Odda, all 
of it up hill, except the last six miles. We started 
about nine o'clock with two horses, an easy carriage, 
and a driver whom I have had to resign to H's more 
promising Danish, for he is elderly and very weak 
in the foreign tongue. From the first we began to 
climb. The driver in Norway always walks up the 
hills, and the male traveler also walks, while the 
female traveler is expected to walk, if she be able. 
The Norse ponies take their time, although at the end 
of the day they have traveled many miles and are 
seemingly little tired. 

By the side of the smooth road rushed a river, the 
Aabo Elv, a mass of foam and spray which sometimes 
flew over us. A couple of miles farther on we came 
to a little dark-blue lake, the Sandven Vand, sur- 
rounded by lofty mountains, on the far side of 
which, almost jutting into it, pressed down the glacier 
of Buarbrae, descending from the snow-fields of the 
Folgefonden, a single expanse of ice and snow some 

(89) 



90 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

forty miles long and ten to twenty wide, the greatest- 
accumulation of snow and ice in western Norway. 
Over the precipices hemming in the vand dashed 
scores of cataracts and cascades, often leaping two 
and three thousand feet in sudden plunge. H says 
nobody can ever show her a waterfall again, nor talk 
about English Waters or Scottish Lochs. 

Passing the lake, we continued to ascend, the road 
entering a deep and sombre gorge, which suddenly 
widened out into a sunlit vale, the air being filled 
with mists and rainbows. We were nearing the Lote- 
fos and the Skarsfos, two of Norway's most cele- 
brated cataracts. Two rivers begin falling almost 
a mile apart, approaching as they fall, until they 
unite in a final leap of nearly fifteen hundred feet, 
a splendid spectacle, while right opposite to them 
tumbles the Espelandsfos, falling from similar 
heights. The spray and mist of the three commingle 
in a common cloud, and the highway passes through 
the eternal shower bath. As you look up you can see 
the entire mass of the waters from their first spring 
into space throughout their tumultuous, furious de- 
scent, until they eddy at your feet. Nature is so 
lavish here with her gigantic earth and water masses 
that one is perpetually awe-struck. 

One incident has occurred today, which I presume 
I may take as a high compliment to my native tongue. 
One of two young Frenchmen, whose carriage has 
traveled near our own, while walking ahead of his 
vehicle, found the ponies disposed to walk him down. 



ODDA TO HORRE. 91 

Twice this happened. Then he waxed wroth. He sus- 
pected the tow-headed Norse driver of not being 
really asleep, but of trying to even up the ancient 
national grudge against his own dear France. He 
flew into a Gallic passion. He stopped short. He 
halted the team. He awoke the driver. He shouted 
in broken English, "You drive me down! You drive 
me down ! You vone scoundrel ! I say vone damn to 
you, I say vone damn, I say vone damn!" — shaking 
his fist in the astonished face of the sleepy-head. After 
that the Norseman kept awake and the French gentle- 
man walked safely in the middle of the road. He evi- 
dently felt that to swear in French would be quite 
lost upon the son of the Vikings. English alone 
would do the job. 

We climbed for many miles a deep glen called the 
Seljestad Juvet ; and dined long past the hour of noon 
at a wayside inn, the Seljestad Hotel. The hotel was 
kept by women. **Our men," they said, "are gather- 
ing hay at the Saeter (mountain farm) far up on the 
mountain highlands. They are gone for a month, 
and will not return until the crop is all got in. ' ' We 
paid our modest reckoning to a delicate, fair-haired, 
blue-eyed little woman, with quiet, graceful manners, 
well bred and courteous in bearing. She is the book- 
keeper and business manager of the inn, "so long as 
the summer season lasts," she said. And then she 
sails to England in one of her father 's ships, and there 
becomes a governess in an English family until 
another summer holiday shall come around. She had 



92 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

never been to America. "Some day," her skipper 
sire had "promised to take her to New York," when 
they would "run over for a day" to Minneapolis to 
see an aunt and cousins who were prospering, as do 
all Norwegians in America's opportunity-affording 
air. And "Americans, she always liked to meet," 
she said, "for unlike the English, they met you so 
frankly and did not condescend." She showed H all 
through the neat and tidy kitchen, while a big black 
nanny goat stood in the doorway and watched them 
both. 

All the afternoon we kept on climbing by the wind- 
ing roadway, passing a black-watered, snow-fed tarn, 
the Gors Vand, and over the Gorssvingane pass 
above the snow line, where snow-fields stretched below 
us, around us, above us. From the summit of 3,392 
feet above Odda and the sea, we had a superb view of 
all the vast Folgefond ice-field behind us, and before 
us two others, the Breifond and the Haukeli Fjeld, 
as vast, while 2,000 feet right down beneath us lay 
a deep blue lake, the Roldals Vand. 

The road now wound ten kilometers (six and one- 
third miles) down into the deep valley by many suc- 
cessive loops, twelve of them, one-half a mile to the 
loop — a feat of fine engineering, for this is a military 
road. "We came down on a full trot all the way, even 
as Ole Mon came down the Laera Dal, until we reined 
in at a picturesque inn at the vale of Horre, over- 
looking the valley of Roldal and its vand. Now we 
are in a cozy hostelry, the Hotel Breifond, with a room 



HOTEL BREIFOND UPON THE ROLDALS VAND. 93 

looking out over the exquisite deep-blue lake, encom- 
passed by green mountains and snow-covered summits. 

Our hotel is kept by two sweet-faced elderly women, 
serene and rosy-cheeked, dressed in black with im- 
maculate white caps; one is the widow of a daring 
seaman who years ago went down with his ship in a 
winter gale. He was the captain and would not leave 
his post, though many of the crew deserted and were 
saved. The other is her spinster sister, whose be- 
trothed lover likewise was lost at sea. In the summer 
time they here harbor many anglers, who come to 
fish the waters of the Roldals Vand and adjacent 
streams, which like most Norwegian lakes and rivers 
are rented out by the local provincial or district gov- 
ernments. The visitors who come here are chiefly 
English, the ladies tell us, and great is their distress 
and often violent their objurgation at the absence of 
any darkness when they may sleep. They cannot 
adjust themselves to the nightless days. They are 
inexpressibly shocked when they fiind themselves play- 
ing a game of golf or tennis at midnight, or forgetful 
of the flight of time in the excitement of a salmon 
chase, pausing to eat a midday snack at 2 a. m. 

Our beds are the softest we have yet slept in, for 
both mattress and coverlet are of eider down. The 
two ladies have been delighted to talk with H in the 
native tongue, and have told her of their nephews and 
cousins who are getting rich owning fine wheat farms 
in the Red River of the North. "Come back to us in 
June," they say. "Our wild flowers are then in 



94 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

bloom, and the hungry trout and salmon will then 
rise to any fly!" And H and I resolve that in June 
we surely will return. 

I saw one or two small pale butterflies to-day, and 
one gray moth at the snow edge, where we crossed the 
divide ; the only ones I yet have seen. The birds, in 
this northland, of course, are all new to me; the 
crows are gray, with black wings, heads and tails; a 
magpie with white shoulders and white on head, and 
long, blue-black tail, is very tame ; while a bird I take 
to be a jay is numerous, with black body, white 
shoulders and wing tips, and tail feathers edged with 
white. I have seen some gray swallows which are 
now gathering in flocks preparatory to going south, 
and several sparrows much like our field sparrows; 
and sandpipers and upland plover, very small. The 
gray crows have a coarse croak like a raven, **Krak- 
ers" they are called. In England we saw and heard 
our only lark the day we drove from Ventnor to 
Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, but I heard no other song 
birds in England, only once, near Oxford, when I 
caught a note like our song sparrow's, while crows 
and rooks swarmed everywhere from Southampton to 
Inverness. In Denmark there are many storks, and 
I there saw the nest of one, a gigantic mass of sticks 
and mud, built on the ridge of a barn, but I noticed 
few other birds, except the gulls and terns along the 
sea. At Vang, the other day, I saw, as I wrote you, 
the ptarmigan, and the capercailzie stuffed and 



THE BIRDS WE SAW. 95 

mounted by a Norwegian living there ; they are found 
on the mountains thereabouts; and a passenger, day 
before yesterday, on the Sogne-fjord-boat, had in 
his hand half a dozen ptarmigan, with their plumage 
already turning toward the winter's white. 



XIL 

Over the Lonely Haukeli Fjeld — ^Witches and Pixies, 
and Maidens Milking: Goats. 

Hotel Haukelid, September 17, 1903. 

This morning we left Hotel Breifond about eight 
o'clock and although we started alone, three other 
carriages soon caught up with us, and we set off to- 
gether, ours being the first in the line. As it is the 
etiquette of the drivers never to pass each other, we 
have kept this order all the day. Next behind us was 
a Dane with his Norwegian wife, from Bergen, to 
whom H talked in their own tongue. Next to them 
were the two young Frenchmen with whom I have 
mpnaged to converse, and behind these rode a Ger- 
man and his frau, who were most icy until they 
learned we were not English but Americans, where- 
upon they grew friendly indeed. We have got 
well acquainted while walking together up the long 
mountain slopes. 

Yesterday we crossed the divide at a maximum ele- 
vation of 3,392 feet, and were above the snow line; 
to-day we again traversed the snow-fields at a yet 
higher altitude, passing under one snow mass by a 
tunnel, where H took a snap-shot of me standing in 

C96) 




A MILE STONE. 




CATTLE ON THE HAUKELI FJELD. 



THE LONELY HAUKELI FJELD. 97 

the snow, and reached the maximum altitude of 3,500 
feet. 

From the emerald valley of the Roldals Vand we 
crept up a long ascent for twenty miles, and I walked 
the whole of it. We followed the foaming Yasdals 
Elv to its source, until all trees were below us, and 
only short grasses, mosses and lichens grew amid the 
masses of drear, black rock, and wide fields and 
patches of snow. This was the most desolate region I 
have ever yet beheld or set foot upon; no life of any 
sort; "aucuns animaux, aucuns oiseaux; seulement les 
roches, le silence et le froid/' as one of the young 
Frenchmen exclaimed ! There was not even a gnat or 
a butterfly. The primordial adamant rock presented 
as sharp and unworn edges to the blows of the icy 
torrents as when God first made it. The sun was 
warm and all the streams brim full, swollen from the 
melting snows. High on the height of land we found 
two silent lakes, the Ulivaa Vand and the Staa Vand. 
No life stirred about them, although our driver as- 
serted they were "alive with fish." 

On these silent heights with their mosses and 
lichens, goats and reindeer thrive, and the latter range 
throughout the year. 

We dined near the summit at a neat log inn called 
Haukeli-Saeter upon a soup, boiled salmon, reindeer 
steak and vegetables, — all good. Here our Germans 
clamored for sauerkraut and iter, and were much per- 
turbed at receiving instead schooners of sweet milk 
7 



98 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

and caraway-seeded tea-cakes. The inn is built in 
typical Norse style, with sharp and elaborately carved 
gables, and is kept open chiefly for the benefit of 
tourist travel. 

Our driver is a quaint and lackadaisical old Norsk, 
who speaks a drawling, ancient Roldal patois. The 
first day we could not do much with him, although H 
tried her best Danish. But to-day he is beginning to 
thaw out and has at last become really garrulous. 
He is full of peasant superstition and folk lore which 
he implicitly believes. These Haukeli Fjelde will 
never be inhabited by man, he says, for they are al- 
ready the home of the giant and dangerous Trolls, 
mysterious and mighty spirits who are inimical to 
man. They dwell on the barest and bleakest and most 
desolate mountain tops, where they devour young kids 
and reindeer fawns and, occasionally, even dare to 
kidnap a child, and are always on the watch to steal 
a buxom lass. It is useless to chase or follow them, 
they are never to be caught, and while they may 
show themselves at times if they shall choose, yet they 
are invisible to most human eyes. He has never 
seen a Troll, he says, but once he knew an old man 
who had been scared by one which tried to catch him 
when a boy. 

There are also witches upon the Haukeli moun- 
tain tops, the old man says. He is sure he has heard 
them hurtling through the air, sometimes, when driv- 
ing alone in the dusk of midsummer nights, crossing 
the desolate heights of the Haukeli Fjeld. I asked 



TROLLS AND WITCHES. iiH 

him if they still rode on broomsticks as they used to 
do in Germany, but he declared that they were more 
bloodthirsty than that, for they always carried ancient 
Viking broadswords, which they had picked up after 
some of the big fights which take place before break- 
fast in Valhalla every morning among the Vikings. 
Every summer some few witches are sure to be seen or 
at any rate heard, by some lonely peasant caught by 
fatigue on a twilight mountain top. There is one 
more beautiful than all the rest, he says. He calls her 
*'Hulda," and says she is a great hand to seduce 
and beguile young men. She can fix herself up to ap- 
pear very beautiful, and to look upon her is to fall 
fast in love with her. Then she taps a rock with a 
long staff she carries and lo! it opens and there 
within are splendid chambers, a fairy palace, with all 
the allurements of golden furnishings and sumptuous 
hangings and a table groaning under the weight of 
delicious things to eat. If, dazzled by this glimpse of 
paradise, the youth once enters and is taken in her 
arms and kissed by her, then it is all up with him. 
He never escapes, but after, she has toyed with him 
to her heart's content in idle dalliance, and grown 
tired of him, then are his blackened bones cast forth 
upon some barren mountain top, perhaps to be found 
long years afterward by wandering goatherd or 
venturesome hunter. Between these Trolls and the 
witches, H has acquired a most wholesome fear of the 
Haukeli Fjeld, and she vows she would never drive 
over it alone. L OF C 



lUO THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

Also, the old man has at first hinted at and 
then confided to ns that the trolls and witches are 
not indeed the so serious menace they might seem, 
for they are really afraid of man and keep generally 
well ont of his way ; but that the real vexation of life 
comes from the little pixies and sprites, who love to 
live handily about your house, and who are always 
making trouble, either out of a spirit of pure inischief , 
or else by reason of jealousy or pique. They are 
''very touchy," he says, and you never know when or 
how you may offend them. But if you do, then woe 
betide you. They will steal the feed out of your 
horse's trough, or from his very nosebag right before 
your eyes, and so deft are they at their tricks that 
you can never catch them. You only discover that 
your horse gets thinner and thinner until he finally 
dies, while if they shall be pleased with what you have 
done or said you will find the horses always sleek and 
fat and able to do two days ' work in one. I asked him 
how he stood in with the pixies just now, for I thought 
his team looked rather poor, but he said that was by 
reason of the hard summer's work, the pixies having 
done him no ill for several years. They also delight 
to milk the goats and cows upon the sly, he said, and 
will steal the cheese set out to dry, and often play 
such havoc with household supplies as to drive the 
peasants to despair. For this reason it is, that many 
good farmers set out little bowls of milk and bits of 
cheese in some silent meadow or mountain dell, where 
the pixies may eat quite undisturbed. 



MAIDENS MILKING GOATS. 101 

As if to emphasize the old man's words, we 
just then passed the hut of a woman goatherd almost 
upon the summit of the vast lonely Haukeli Fjeld 
and there, set upon a little shelf, high up near the 
moss-grown roof, were a small milk-bowl and a bit 
of brown cheese, an offering to the elves and pixies 
of that place. 

The information I here give you may be wrong in 
minor detail, for we could not always perfectly in- 
terpret the quaint and ancient dialect in which the 
facts were told, but H says she could make out the 
most of what the old man said; for after all Danish 
and Norse speech are very nearly the same. 

We were now well over the height of land and were 
coasting down toward prospective supper. The barren 
waste of black and gray rocks, across which we had 
traveled, began to give place to greener slopes; the 
mosses had returned ; the grass was peeping up again. 
Swinging around a well-graded curve, we dropped in- 
to a little valley. The evening sun was behind us, the 
slanting rays tipped peak and snowy crest with reddish 
gold, but the vale below was wrapped in soft shadow. 
On the left, stood a moss-roofed cabin, near where ran 
the road; on the right, across a boisterous brook, we 
saw a group of Norse maidens, clad in blue-and-red 
peasant costume, surrounded by a herd of goats. The 
goats were apparently in great excitement. Each 
young woman was following a goat and that particu- 
lar goat walked with demure and expectant gait. One 
old gray goat moved with particularly stately step, 



102 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

while the lady by his side held in her hand a small 
wooden bucket. I presumed that, of course, she pro- 
posed to give that goat his evening meal. Imagine 
my astonishment when, before the goat really was 
aware, she collared it, swung her leg over it and hold- 
ing it fast between her thighs, facing its rear, began 
energetically milking, not it, or him, but her! The 
goat had disappeared, only a tail and a head dis- 
covered themselves beyond the lady's skirts, and the 
evening shadows gathered about that maid and goat, 
— ^that goat held tight as though in iron vise. The 
day was too nearly done for my kodak to avail, so I 
have tried to sketch the episode, and so also has one 
of our French companions — and I send you the pic- 
tures. If the old poet had only seen the tableau of 
goat and maid he never could have written the fol- 
lowing lines which long ago my memory clipped from 
the Yale News: 

"The milkmaid pensively milked the goat, 
When, sighing, she paused to mutter, 
I wish you brute, you'd turn to milk, 
And the animal turned to butt her!" 

We have driven some eighty kilometers to-day and 
have been in the fresh mountain air, open air, for 
eleven hours. H is growing plump, and her cheeks 
have caught the Norse red. The keen air makes our 
blood tingle in spite of the cold, for it is cold. On 
these summits ice forms the moment the sun is hid. 
We are in full winter clothing, and wrap our heavy 





NORSE MAIDEN MILKING GOAT. 



COMMENTS ALONG THE WAY. 103 

sea rugs about us as we sit in the carriage. In a 
fortnight the snows will cover the passes and tourist 
travel will cease till another year. 

During the last two days we have frequently met 
men bearing on their backs and dragging on sledges 
piles of birch branches, the twig ends with the leaves 
yet on, and we have noticed here and there, entire 
birch-growing hillsides where the saplings had all 
been trimmed, the tender twigs sheared off and fre- 
quently the lopped-off branches stacked up in bundles 
stuck in a handy tree-crotch. This is the winter 
fodder for the goats, and the birch twig is as im- 
portant for them as is the hay for the cattle. Just as 
in Switzerland, large flocks of goats are pastured 
throughout the summer upon the higher mountain 
slopes and ridges, and much cheese is manufactured 
from their milk. Of sheep we have seen few, although 
I understand a good many are raised for the local 
demand for wool. Like Scotland, Norway is here- 
abouts too cold and harsh for sheep to do their best. 

Nor have we noticed many fowls, turkeys or geese 
or ducks about the farmsteads, — only a few chickens 
here and there. This also is too cold a climate, with 
too rigorous and lengthy winters for poultry to be 
profitable. Nor have we had chicken set before us 
but the once when we supped with the inquisitive 
dame of Tonsaasen. Trout and reindeer steak as well 
as eggs we have often had, and once roast ptarmigan. 

Neither in Britain, nor in France, nor in Germany 
have I ever seen a wooden house ; all buildings there 



104 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

are of stone or brick ; but here the buildings through- 
out the countryside are all of wood; hewn logs most 
frequently, not uncommonly of sawed lumber, these 
latter quite often painted white and red, reminding 
one of tidy New England. The roofs are steep to 
shed the snows or, otherwise, quite flat and covered 
with a layer of birch bark and then tight-growing 
sods and mosses, which covering the snow may melt 
upon but through which it will never soak. 

To-day being Sunday, we have met many church- 
goers upon the road, and have passed two churches 
where the Lutheran service was being held. During 
our drive we have constantly noted the number of 
these Lutheran churches, as well as the snug-built, 
substantial schoolhouses. Piety and intelligence 
deeply mark the lives of these Norse people. Just as 
in Denmark, so here also is the Lutheran church 
recognized and supported by the state, and its pastors 
constitute a formidable and influential body, guiding 
the thought of the Norwegian people. Apparently 
the schools here are as universal and as well attended 
as our own. Every Norwegian child, who is of school 
age, is compelled by law to go to school. Nowhere 
outside of my own country have I seen so many school- 
houses dotting the countryside. In England there 
are no common schools and no schoolhouses. In 
France the schoolhouses are hidden among the build- 
ings of the clustered villages. In Switzerland, per- 
haps, the schoolhouse is as much in evidence as here, 
but in neither Germany nor Holland, although their 



WE ARE THE STABS. 105 

universities lead the world, is there revealed the teach- 
ing of the common people as is done by the many 
schoolhouses of this northern land. 

Now we are housed in a commodious and quite 
modern inn, and have had a delicious trout supper, 
all our four carriage-loads of travelers sitting at one 
long table, where H and I have been the stars — 
for we only and alone can talk equally to the Dane and 
his Norwegian wife, to the young Frenchmen, and to 
the German pair ; while through us only can they ex- 
change ideas, for we alone can talk to each in his own 
native tongue. "Ah! these Americans!" "You talk 
all the languages!" ** How wide you see!" ** While 
we, we do not see beyond the boundaries of France." 
"We speak too seldom a foreign tongue." "You are 
bigger-minded than are we!" So exclaimed one of 
our French friends. 



xm. 

Descending from the Fjelde — ^The Telemaf ken Fjords — 
The Afctic Twilight. 

Dalen, September 8, 1902, 7 P. M. 

Our series of great rides on land and water is at 
an end. For eight days we have been inhaling the 
crisp, buoyant, ozone-laden atmosphere, viewing the 
majestic scenery, watching the sturdy, strong-faced 
men and women, the rosy, yellow-haired children; 
and now it is over. H and I agree that in our lives 
we will never again experience a more delightful out- 
ing — our sure-enough honeymoon. 

This morning we left the Hotel Haukelid with only 
sixty kilometers for the day, and most of it down hill ; 
since noon yesterday we have been coming down. 
Just a little snow was now to be seen far away upon 
distant summits, while forests of birches, interspersed 
with aspens, covered the nearer slopes. Our road led 
us along the borders of several exquisite lakes, th-e 
little Voxli Vand and then the greater Grungadals 
Vand, about a mile wide and ten or twelve miles long ; 
frowning precipices and cloud-wrapped heights en- 
circled us on every hand, their rocks now largely 
greened over with mosses, and birches — only a few firs 

(106) 




A NORSE CABIN. 




OUR HOSTESSES, HAUKELl SAETER. 



DESCENDING PROM THE HAUKELI FJELDE. 107 

— growing wherever trees might thrust their roots. 
Then we drove through a narrow clove, along a froth- 
ing torrent, and came to another vand equally shut in, 
but not so long nor so wide, — a greener, warmer valley, 
Boertedals Vand in the Boerte Dal. Here we dined 
at Hotel Boerte, rested till 3 p. m., and then got 
away for one of the finest thirty kilometers of the 
trip. If we only had had Ole Mon to drive us, how 
perfect would have been the day ! I imagined we had 
already come down enough to be at the bottom, but 
we were yet to descend a mighty canyon with the 
road blasted out of the precipice's side, and walled 
in with rock posts and iron defenders, much like the 
Laera Dal, while far beneath us wound a silver thread, 
the almost imperceptible roar of whose waters floated 
up a tremulous murmur. We came down at a rattling 
trot, every moment unfolding new vistas of vale and 
precipice and mountain. After two hours of this 
fearful, yet joyous, coasting we crossed a wide-span- 
ning iron bridge and swept out into the charming 
vale of Dalen, at the head of the Bandaks Vand, 
where now we are. The mountains are here clothed 
in heavy forests of birch and much deciduous timber, 
only a little of the fir; I can scarcely realize that 
yesterday we were up amongst the mosses, the lichens 
and the snows. As we descended we kept taking off 
our wraps ; our rugs were folded up ; H took off her 
golf cape, then her jacket; she wanted to ride with 
bared head, so soft and warm had grown the air. 



108 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

Kristiania, Norway, September 10, 1902. 

Yesterday, we left Dalen at the head of navigation 
on the Bandaks Yand, boarded a taut little steamboat 
about 150 feet long, built for deep water, and trav- 
eled sixty-five kilometers through a succession of 
vands and fjords — the Telemarken Fjords — canals 
and locks — ^twenty locks in all — to Skien (called 
"Sheen"), where we took the railway for Kristiania, 
arriving at midnight. 

The lakes were long, narrow and mostly shut in by 
heavily-timbered mountains, which as always, lifted 
up to enormous heights, green vales and valleys open- 
ing in between, where were picturesque hamlets and 
neat, thrifty-looking farmsteads. 

Nothing here impresses me more than the great 
patience and tireless energy of the **Norsks," as they 
call themselves. The magnificent roads, superior to 
those of England, equal, almost equal to those of 
France; the canals, blasted for miles through solid 
granite ; the railways, which are as good as our own ; 
the little boats so perfectly appointed. The Norwe- 
gians impress you as being born seamen; they know 
how to build and how to sail a boat, and you feel it. 

Standing upon the forward deck, watching the 
changing panorama of vale and lake and mountain, 
I became so absorbed in the enchanting pictures that 
it was some moments before I noticed a slit-eyed, high- 
cheek-boned, black-straight-haired, short, pudgy youth 
or man — ^hard to tell which — a sure-enough Lap if 
ever there was one, who was making vain efforts to 



UPON THE TELEMARKEN FJORDS. 109 

hold conversation with me. He spoke slowly and with 
some hesitation in perfect Cockney English. I at 
once gave him my ear, and asked him where he had 
learned to speak so well. ' ' Hi ave been a cook in Lon- 
non," he said. "Hi ave been hassistant cook in a 
Hinglish otel, you know. Hi am just now leaving 
the otel at Dalen, where Hi ave been hassistant cook 
this summer, you know." Whereupon he told me of 
his experiences in London. How he landed there 
from a Norwegian ship, friendless and unknown, and 
made his way by his aptitude in wiping dishes ! And 
some day he **oped" to go to **Hamerica" and there 
own a kitchen all for himself. "Ow strange it must 
be for an Hamerican to see real mountains," he ex- 
claimed, and I discovered that the only America he 
knew about was the prairie land of the flat west. 

Upon my asking whether he was not a Laplander, 
he resented the suggestion with great vehemence, de- 
claring himself to be a Viking pure, and he begged 
me to let him know if I should learn of any good 
openings for dish-wipers in America, especially if it 
would lead to the dignity of cook. His manner was 
frank and simple, wholly free from self-consciousness, 
except as he took great pride in being able to speak 
the English tongue. In Norway there are no classes 
and all men stand equal before the law. It is as re- 
spectable there to work as it is in America, and sim- 
ilarly men meet you as your natural equals. There 
is none of that offensive subserviency which so jars 



110 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

upon one in most of the monarchy and aristocracy 
bestridden lands. 

The volume of water which flows from these lakes 
and through these deep canals is immense and we 
have sometimes swept along the narrower channels at 
really an exciting pace. "We had just passed through 
the beautiful Flaa Vand and descended the deep full- 
flowing river, the Bids Elv, with its many locks, to 
the greater Nordsjoe Vand, when we drew up beside 
a little pier. There were many people upon it. Evi- 
dently, there was here gathered an unusual crowd, and 
down the hillside leading toward us came yet others. 
The whole community had turned out. Two tall, 
rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, fair-haired young men were 
the center of the throng; about them the others 
pressed. They were neatly dressed, fine-looking fel- 
lows, and the men and women were kissing them good- 
bye. They were going to America, perhaps never to 
return. The mother, a gentle-faced, white-haired old 
lady, wept on the necks of each of them, and the 
white-haired father kissed them upon either cheek, 
and then everybody rushed in to shake their hands. 
They were going to America where so many of Nor- 
way's most ambitious and able sons had gone before. 
The whole countryside would watch their career and 
wait for news of their success ! Two iron-bound chests 
were dragged on to the boat. The young men stepped 
alertly aboard, their faces flushed with the excitement 
of the farewells and the anticipations of the land 
across the sea. As I watched them and their family 



AMERICAN DOLLARS AND NORSE FARMS. Ill 

and friends waving their adieus I could not but 
ponder upon this instinct of the old-world races, my 
own among the rest, to go out and seize life's prizes 
even across the widest waters. The leave-taking I 
was now beholding must be not unlike that of the 
men and women who in the days of Pilgrim and Puri- 
tan and Cavalier left little England to found a com- 
munity where freedom and opportunity are still the 
loadstones which attract the energy and youth of all 
the world. 

In traveling through Norway, I have been greatly 
surprised to see so many newly-built farmhouses, 
barns and farm buildings, new fences and modern 
gates. Everywhere the old and tumbled-down is be- 
ing replaced by the substantial and modem. I have 
seen nothing like this anywhere in Europe; nowhere 
so general a replacing of the old with the new. Many 
of the new farmhouses are not merely substantial, but 
are architecturally attractive. There must be abun- 
dant money coming from somewhere to pay the cost of 
this universal rebuilding. I have asked about it more 
than once and every time I receive the same reply. 
' ' The sons have gone to America, they are in Chicago, 
in Minnesota, in Dakota. They have grown rich. They 
are sending back the money. They want the old places 
made as trim and spick as though they were in Amer- 
ica." **Put everything in good repair," they say, 
"never mind the cost." And then, every few years 
they return with the American grandchildren to see 
the beloved old folks. More and more of these Ameri- 



112 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

can-Norwegians are coming every year to holiday in 
the fatherland. Many now regularly sojourn through- 
out the summer. A few, a very few, remain to end 
their days on the loved home-soil. 

I also learn that it is to supply the demand of this 
increasing travel from America to Norway that the 
Scandinavian-American line have recently put on 
the large ocean steamers now sailing direct from New 
York to Kristiansand, with accommodations equal to 
anything which has hitherto entered the ports of Ger- 
many and England and France. 

The other day at Loeken, we were waited on at 
table by a fine-looking young woman who spoke per- 
fect United States. She had an air about her of 
comfortable independence. The house, the farm 
buildings, everything about the place was new and 
neat. While we were talking with her, she told us that 
she had a brother and an uncle in the far west, one at 
Spokane, who was rich. She was living with him when 
word came that the old father had passed away. She 
was needed at home to care for the mother and the 
younger children, so she returned; and the brother 
sent back the money to have the old place put in 
perfect repair. 

This intimate connection between our thriving west 
and Norwegian home life, largely explains, I think, 
that independent American spirit which now so 
prominently marks Norway, and the growth and as- 
sertion of which is driving her by natural momentum 
away from the hectoring ties of franchise-constricted, 



RECRUITING AMERICAN FARM HANDS. 113 

aristocratic Sweden, pushing her toward her inevi- 
table destiny — to become a Republic, 

The immigration from Norway to the United States 
has taken from her nearly one-half the population, 
a much larger percentage than has yet come forth 
from Sweden. Although even there, so great is now 
the exodus, that the Swedish Ministry is alarmed; 
there is also uneasiness in Norway. Recently, laws 
have been enacted prohibiting the steamship agents 
from spreading among the people the glowing ac- 
counts of America, by means of which so many steer- 
age tickets are sold, but all the same, the propaganda 
is persistently carried on. At Skogstad, the other 
day, I fell in with an alert-looking, quiet-mannered 
man, who, after he learned I was an American, con- 
fided to me that he himself was from Minnesota. He 
had been born in Norway, but went to America when 
a boy. He was now back in Norway representing 
large farming interests in the Northwest, and his busi- 
ness was to recruit farm hands for the western wheat 
fields. He said he had penetrated during the past 
three years into every nook and cranny of Norway, 
everywhere finding out what vigorous and sturdy 
young men would like to go to America, and then 
arranging with them to pay their passage, and supply 
sufficient funds to enable them to pass the immigra- 
tion inspectors, and providing also their railroad 
transportation to the west. ' ' They are a splendid and 
hard working lot of men," he said. "We want all of 
them we can get. And most of them do well when 



114 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

they reach. America ; many of them became rieh men." 
He was traveling in the disguise of an itinerant doctor 
selling herbs and roots. 

Crossing the mountain this side of Boerte, where 
the road wound up through the fir forest to avoid an 
immense cliff which jutted into the lake, I stopped and 
dug up a little seedling fir, surely a real Norway 
spruce. I took it up with care and have now brought 
it to Kristiania and to-day am sending it to America 
by mail wrapped in damp mosses, and trust that it 
will reach Kanawha with life enough to live and thrive 
in its West Virginia home. Along the roadside, not 
far from where I found the seedling, were lying a 
fine pair of skjis, just as the wearer laid them aside, 
only to be worn when winter shall return. The Nor- 
wegian does not need to lock his door ! 

Upon the mossy, marshy, moorland summits and 
divides which we have traversed, I have noticed wide- 
spread beds of peat. In some places these are ex- 
tensively worked, large areas being uncovered and 
the squares of peat piled up to dry. The existence of 
this fuel has proved a godsend to Norway, for the 
forests are often distant and year by year the wood- 
lands diminish. Although there are some inferior 
coal beds in southern Sweden, there are none in Nor- 
way, and for fuel her peat beds and her forests are 
her sole domestic supply. And yet, despite this lack 
of fuel, it seems to me that Norway is dowered with 
enormous stores of power. She possesses water power 
without stint. King Winter surely cannot freeze up 



THE ARCTIC TWILIGHT. 115 

all the streams. Will not the day yet come when the 
harnessed water powers of Norway may run the tur- 
bines which will supply the world? 

It is yet early September; the belated summer of 
this far northern land, to our strange eyes, is just 
begun. The meadows are green; the fields of grain 
are scarcely yellowed; in the markets of Kristiania 
we see daily exposed for sale fresh-ripened straw- 
berries ; in our Virginian latitude it would be the sea- 
son of the month of May. Yet we see big stacks of 
firewood piled near each farmhouse door; we see the 
cabin newly banked with earth against the frost; at 
blacksmith's shop we see men hammering on well- 
used sled; alongside the road, awaiting the winter's 
need, lies an upturned snowplow newly ironed; 
everywhere men are making ready for the cold. In 
a fortnight the highway across the Haukeli Fjeld will 
be blocked with new-fallen snow. In a month the 
jingling bells of sleighs and sledges will sound along 
the now verdant valley of the Baegna Elv, 

A year ago, when traveling in Mexico, in southern 
Michoacan, the tropical precipitancy of the night was 
sure to take me unawates. I was never quite pre- 
pared for the sharp transition from day to night. 
The hot red sun rested a moment above the towering 
Cordillera, then it dipped behind, and the cold white 
stars instantly shone forth. Here in Norway my 
senses are equally surprised. It is already September 
and yet "early candle light," means near ten o'clock. 
The day dies slowly. The contours of vale and moun- 



116 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

tain almost imperceptibly fade upon the eye. A violet 
blueness softens form and hue. Little by little the 
violet changes into gray, and then the grayness per- 
vades the air as though the shadow of some phantom 
raven's wing overspread the world. 

At nine o'clock, at half past nine, at ten o'clock, 
the goats and cattle are awake — ^we have made long 
day-drives by reason of the limits to our time — I 
wonder if they ever sleep. The sparrows and gray- 
coated crows fly soberly across our way; a magpie 
softly flutters to the road. I hear no bird-songs, only 
faint twitters, no chirping crickets, no piping frogs 
and newts, none of the evening sounds of my Vir- 
ginian countryside. A hush creeps over dal and 
fjeld and fjord, even as do the mysterious 
violet and gray shadows. We ourselves are drowsed. 
I do not speak to H nor she to me. To the ponies 
Ole Mon has ceased to talk. The world is stilled. We 
draw long breaths, inhale the delicious air, lean 
back against the cushions of our seat, and day- 
dream amidst this hush of man and thing. The 
old Norse driver of the Roldal cautions H to watch. 
"This is the hour," he says, "when the elves and 
pixies stir abroad. Count the fifth meadow from 
where you stand and there they are always sure to 
be." Thus have we driven through the twilight, the 
mysterious, lingering twilight of this far and almost 
Arctic North. 

This is the last letter you will receive from Norway 
and I am sure that you will agree with me, after read- 



RETURN TO KRISTIANIA. 117 

ing what I have sent you, that nowhere in all the 
world may one have a more delightful outing. 

As to expenses, I figure it up that the total cost for 
both of us is a little less than five dollars per day, 
which includes our carriage, our driver, our eating, 
our sleeping and the liberal fees which, like good 
Americans, we have everywhere bestowed. Here in 
Norway the oere (two and one-half cents) is as big 
as the quarter, and the kroner (twenty-seven cents) 
as big as the dollar. 

How long the oere will loom so large I dare not 
say, for the American invasion is begun, and I fear 
the kroner will soon be no bigger than the dime. 



XIV. 

Kf istiania to Stockholm— A Wedding Party — ^Dif fet- 
ing Norsk and Swede* 

Stockholm, Sweden, September 12, 1902. 
"We came over here night before last from Kris- 
tiania, by the night train; by sovevogn (sleep- 
wagon), the first I have tried in Europe. We trav- 
eled first-elass and had a compartment to ourselves. 
About 9 p. M. a porter came in at a way-station, put 
all our bags out in the corridor, pulled out the 
round cushions at the back of the seats and put them 
into the overhead racks; he then pulled out a linen 
cover with which he overlaid the long seat, and un- 
holed small, wee pillows from a cavity at the end of 
each seat; the beds were made! Later, another 
man informed me that we could have sheets at one 
kroner (twenty-seven cents) each; but these we de- 
clined. Fortunately, we had with us our heavy sea 
rugs. I put H into my long gray overcoat, did her up 
in the blanket and rug, and tucked her big golf cape 
over her. Then I put on my blanket smoking jacket, 
my slippers and cap, rolled up in a blanket and rug, 
and so we slept comfortably on our narrow seat-beds. 
There was no heat in the car, and only one toilet room 
for both sexes ! The night was cold and it was with 

(118) 




f 




AMERICAN BELLES. A NORWEGIAN BRIDE. 119 

difficulty we managed to keep warm. Such is the 
modem European method of running a sleeping car. 

The train we traveled in was crowded. In our car 
every compartment was filled. There were two groups 
of travelers who interested us. The first was a party 
of Americans, a petite elderly woman, keen, lively, 
very much mistress of herself, evidently accustomed 
to command, and with her two pretty black-eyed 
American girls, ''pert," ** sassy," and used to receiv- 
ing the homage of man ! In their company were half 
a dozen tall, blond-bearded, blue-eyed Viking youths, 
entirely willing to be commanded and to render 
homage. They were all in uniform, a dark blue cloth 
with red facings and a very little gold braid. The 
blue eyes shot tender glances, we thought, the black 
ones defending against Cupid's darts with great 
vivacity. Each young man presented an enormous 
bouquet to the elderly woman, and one gave her a 
basket of fruit — ^the girls got nothing, only the blue- 
eye-flashes. And how eagerly the young men promised 
to call on the elderly woman, if ever they should be 
BO fortunate as to visit New York ! And all the while 
the two American belles laughed and smiled and smote 
yet deeper through the dark blue uniforms. The de- 
parting train almost carried away with us one fair- 
haired giant. All the military caps came off with 
sweeping bows, while two handkerchiefs fluttered 
from the windows. 

The other group took us by storm and also captured 
the train. Before we knew it, there was a surging 



120 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

crowd outside the ear and the roar of many Viking 
throats. And then into the compartment next to ours 
rushed a pack of ladies, one of them all in white, with 
a sweet face half hid in a pink satin bonnet. A little 
man with waxed moustache, curly black hair, wear- 
ing a stovepipe hat, and clad in evening dress, fol- 
lowed close behind. The women admitted him, as 
though by right, but no other man was let inside. 
It was a wedding party. A wedding in high life. He 
was a Professor at Upsala. She was one of Kris- 
tiania's fairest daughters. They had been married 
in the Fru Kirke in the afternoon. She had had a 
big reception at her home. The friends and guests 
were now come down to the train to see them off. She 
was large and fair and rosy, yet in her early twenties. 
He was small and weazen, shriveled and swarthy. 
They called him "Herr Doctor," evidently recogniz- 
ing his eminent standing. Flowers and rice and a 
white satin slipper were thrown into the window. 
There was tremendous hugging and kissing of the 
bride by all the women, — I could not see that here the 
men had any show,— and pandemonium still prevailed 
upon the station platform when the train pulled out. 
Later in the night I was awakened by shouts and then 
most glorious singing. I sat up with a start, the 
melody pulsing through my brain. The Student 
Corps from the University of Upsala had come down 
to the junction where the newly-wedded pair would 
change cars, to welcome their Professor and his bride. 
They were singing a mighty welcome. And it was 



KRISTIANIA TO STOCKHOLM. 121 

such full-toned, full- voiced, perfect and practiced sing- 
ing by the hundreds of young men who seemed to be 
on hand! I fell asleep as our train went on, the 
splendid harmony of the well-trained voices filling 
me with dreams of realms not far away from Para- 
dise. 

Next morning I was about dressed, and H was ad- 
justing her skirt, when the doors, which I thought 
securely locked, flew open and a burly red-faced uni- 
formed official thrust himself in. He came to take 
away the pillow cases! He did not seem to think he 
in any way intruded; privacy is not much respected 
this side the sea. 

Our toilets were scarcely made when the train came 
to a stop in the station at Stockholm. Indeed H was 
not yet quite ready, when another official in uni- 
form again burst open the door and began grab- 
bing our effects. To his astonishment he was forth- 
with ejected and the door shut in his face. "When we 
were finally dressed I went out and found him wait- 
ing for us on the station platform. He was a licensed 
porter. 

"We were first obliged to fetch all our belongings 
to the Custom House, where important-looking of- 
ficials, in gray uniforms trimmed with red, asked per- 
functory questions and hurriedly passed us through 
— an exercise of Swedish authority which seemed quite 
unnecessary since we came direct from Norway under 
the same King. This done, our porter then gathered 
up our bags and rugs, put them into a little two- 



122 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

wheeled push cart and started out across the square. 
Here again I came near meeting the fate of the tender- 
foot. "We did not know the location of the Hotel 
Continental; I stepped up to a cabby and told him 
we wanted to be taken to that hotel. A man in uni- 
form gave me a brass check with "No. 5" marked 
on it, pointing to a cab standing in a long row which 
also bore a No. 5. I handed the brass check to No. 
5 cabby, and was putting in my bag when our porter 
pointed to the farther side of the square. There was 
our hostelry, not three hundred feet away! I took 
out my bag from the carriage, in spite of protest, and 
walked to the hotel. The driver claimed a fare of 
half a kroner and raised a mighty clamor, but I 
vowed I would not give him an oere. Thus you must 
have your eyes about you when you come to a city 
you do not know. 

The Continental is a fine hotel. The rooms are sup- 
plied with electric lights and with telephones (good 
ones, not the imperfect London system). We have 
a large front room, facing the Vasa Gatan, with dress- 
ing room and ante-room, handsomely furnished, and 
as clean as anything can be. We are fain to be con- 
tent with the fourth story, although we asked for the 
tenth, and a new modern elevator takes us up and 
also down ; all this costs only six kroner a day ($1.62) 
for the two of us. Our breakfasts are served in our 
room, two eggs each, a pot of coffee, boiled milk and 
cream, a basket of rolls, fresh radishes, cold tongue, 
cold veal, smoked goose breast, anchovies, cold smoked 



STOCKHOLM AND THE SWEDE. 123 

salmon, cheese, each in a neat little dish by itself, and 
a big round flat slab of slightly salted butter; all for 
one and a half kroner each, three kroner for us two 
(eighty-one cents) . You receive much for your money 
here in Scandinavia. 

The spirit of Stockholm, although intensely Scan- 
dinavian, is yet widely different from that of either 
Copenhagen or Kristiania. It is a difference, not so 
much to the eye, as to the feeling. 

The city presents the same substantial and solid 
types of buildings, there are the same high walls 
of stone and dark red brick, and sharp-gabled roofs 
covered with heavy tiles, the same square towers, the 
same spindly leanness to the steepled churches, and 
in the older sections the narrow streets are paved from 
wall to wall with the same big squares of granite. 
The people are mostly blue-eyed and fair-haired like 
their kindred Danes and Norsks. But here the like- 
ness ends and you feel it the instant you pass out 
upon the street. I missed at once that certain 
self-containment, based upon unostentatious self- 
respect, which marks the Norsk, where no man 
knows a lord but God, and manhood suffrage every- 
where prevails. I missed that composure of manner 
and self-assurance to the step, which lets men look 
you calmly in the eye without offense, that spirit, 
which takes for granted the perfect equality of 
man and man. I instantly felt myself among men 
of another temper. The alert, frank, self-respecting 
manner of the Norsk is lacking in the Swede. I 



124 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

found myself again among a "lower class," who 
have no votes, and treat you with sullen servility, 
and also among men with the swashbuckling manners 
of military caste. Stockholm is full of young officers 
in natty uniforms, who strut along the streets aping 
the braggart insolence one meets among the soldier- 
bestridden Germans. The peasant and townsman 
must also here step aside to let these Yunker soldiery 
pass on. Militarism hangs heavy over Stockholm, 
where the scions of an impecunious aristocracy 
think to find in dashing uniform and truculent Ger- 
man manner a restoration of the noble military tra- 
ditions of the past. 

The Norwegian looks out upon the Twentieth Cen- 
tury and finds his inspiration in the example of free 
America and the universal equality of man. The 
Swede looks ever backward to the glorious days of 
Gustavus Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII, 
and sighs for a return of the good old times when the 
half of Europe trembled before Sweden's military 
might. The lofty mountains and profound valleys, 
the savage mystery of fathomless fjords, the wond- 
rous immensity of the unknown and illimitable sea, 
which fired the brain and pricked the energy of the 
Norseman, and made him poet, pirate, explorer and 
conqueror through a dozen successive centuries, were 
all unknown to the practical-minded Swede. His 
monotonous forests, his sandy levels and shallow 
gulfs, his pond-like and insignificant Baltic Sea, stirred 
no fibre of his imagination ; nor when he crossed those 




A SWEDISH CHURCH. 







ANCIENT SWEDISH FORTRESS. 



DIFFERING NORSE AND SWEDE. 125 

narrow waters and set foot upon the flat and barren 
shores of Germanic and Slavic Europe, was there 
anything in their sombre forests and limitless plains 
and desolate marshes to arouse within him the fire 
of his soul. War with the flaxen-haired savages, who 
swarmed upon these lands like myriad wolves, was his 
only exercise. He sailed up the Gulf of Bothnia till 
he entered the Arctic wastes where dwelt the Laps; 
he followed the shores of the Gulf of Finland, and ex- 
plored the river Neva and Lake Ladoga and connect- 
ing streams, and even crossed to the waters of the 
mighty Volga, and entered Asia by the Caspian Sea ; 
he ascended the lesser Russian rivers, and pitched 
fortified camps along their banks, founding Revel and 
Riga and Novogorod, whence the Swedish Ruriks 
gave to the Muskovites their earliest Czars. He ruled 
Finland and Esthonia and Livonia and Courland, and 
even begat Sigismund, the Polish King. For centuries 
he warred with and ruled these Slavic tribes until at 
last, driven back to his narrow peninsula, the main- 
land knew him only as defeated and expelled. A 
practical, unimaginative fighting man was the Swede. 
He loved war for war's own sake, and when he had no 
longer reason to war for conquest or defense, he clung 
to pike and sword as permanent substitute for plow 
and seine, and hired himself to bickering Slav and 
German and grew famous as a "Mercenary," who 
spilled his blood for pay and the plunder of his 
master's foes. Thus have the cousin peoples swung 
wide apart. The one, free and open-minded ; the other, 



126 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

still dazed by the faded glories of a long dead past, 
turns ever a wistful eye toward the military tyrannies 
of Czar and Kaiser, and finds in the inequalities of 
landed noble and landless yokel, in official and mili- 
tary caste and enthralled peasantry, the realization 
of his Fifteenth Century ideal. 

Thus, as I have wended my way along the Vasa and 
Freds Gatans and neighboring streets, toward the fine 
Gustaf Adolf Torg, the chief public square, mix- 
ing among the jostling crowds, have I felt keenly the 
variant atmospheres of these Norse and Swedish 
lands, differences which finding their roots in the 
historical development of the kindred peoples make 
their present union beneath a single flag and King 
both artificial and constrained. 

While on the surface and to the feeling there is 
apparently wide divergence in political sentiment be- 
tween the Norwegian and Swedish peoples, yet there 
is in reality a closer and closer approachment between 
them. The democratic notions prevailing in Norway 
already stir the pulse of the Swedish peasantry and 
working classes — ^the classes which in Sweden have 
no votes. Already has the demand for universal suf- 
frage been raised in Sweden, and sentiment inimical 
to aristocracy, yunkerdom and privilege, grows con- 
tinually more aggressive. An intelligent and aristo- 
cratic Swede with whom I have discussed this ques- 
tion to-day, admits this rising tide of democracy, and 
admits, also, though ruefully, that not until universal 
suffrage shall become established in Sweden will it 



A UNITED SCANDINAVIAN STATE. 127 

fee possible to come to that understanding with the 
Norwegian people on which may be founded a last- 
ing and united Scandinavian State. Thus in Sweden 
itself, I hear uttered sentiments very nearly akin to 
those which caught my ear when in Copenhagen : the 
possibility, nay, probability, of a common Scandi- 
navian Union, when the peoples of Denmark and Nor- 
way and Sweden shall federate, and the obsolete system 
of kingship and privilege shall be set aside. 



XV. 

Stockholm the Venice of the North — Life and Color 

of the Swedish Capital — Manners of 

the People and their Kins;. 

Stockholm^ September 13, 1902. 
"While wandering about the city I have not taken 
a guide. A guide or a courier is to me always a very 
last resort, but I have followed the movement of the 
crowd, and enjoyed the being lost in it, immersed in 
it, becoming one with it, while yet so separate. I could 
not read the signs, nor understand the speech. I could 
only see. My vision became my one guiding sense. 
My eyes became abnormally alert. Color and form 
and action, — I caught them all. And what I saw, 
my mind held fast. Thus I wandered on through 
many quaint and ancient Gatans (streets) past Plats 
and Torgs (open squares), and over Bros (bridges), 
and yet I felt secure and well assured that, re- 
turning, I should find my way safely back. I knew 
each corner of a street, each square, each unusual 
sign, each building of strange design, even as at home 
I have often wandered alone among the wild moun- 
tains and forests with nothing for a guide but my 
eyes, the sun, and my knowledge of moss and tree. 
Thus has my early training always served me well 

(128) 



STOCKHOLM. 129 

in foreign lands and cities, where speech was strange, 
and I myself unknowing and unknown. 

My first quest was a bookstore and a map. and 
an English or French or German-worded guide book, 
which would tell me of what I saw. By great good 
luck, I happened immediately upon the object of 
my search. I saw a window holding maps. I entered 
a small shop, and found it the ''Bureau" of the "Na- 
tional Tourists' Union," with German spoken per- 
fectly. This bureau is maintained by the enterprising 
citizens of Stockholm, and for most moderate cost 
gives information to tourists, and publishes a series of 
fine maps, showing every road and lake and mountain 
and town and inn in Sweden. I bought a set of the 
maps and one in particular of the city. Thus forti- 
fied I was now perfectly equipped. 

Our few days' sojourn in Stockholm has taught 
me to like the Swede, although he is quite lacking in 
the hearty frankness of the Norsk. Stockholm has 
always been a spot where men have congregated, and 
has been a city known as such these last eight cen- 
turies, ever since Birger Jarl made it the seat of his 
pirate power. It holds the passage between the lakes 
Maelaren, which stretch far inland and now form the 
eastern section of the great Gotta system of canals 
reaching across Sweden to the Kattegat and Atlantic 
Ocean, and the deeply indented waters of the Baltic 
Sea, thus being a natural place of rendezvous and 
commerce ; it was a place easy of access before men had 
roads and mostly traveled by boats. Here the Kings 
9 



130 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

of Sweden have always set their capital, and the his- 
tory of Stockholm is the history of the Swede himself. 

In past ages, disorders and massacres and open 
murders have drenched with blood her streets and her 
great public squares, and Stockholm's dungeons have 
their tales of horror and wickedness to tell. She was 
cruel and turbulent when Sweden herself was harsh 
and savage, she is now equally serene and contented 
under the liberal rule of enlightened King Oscar 
II, and is become one of the best-ordered and most 
beautiful cities of the world. By reason of the many 
islands within her limits, she is called the "Venice of 
the North," and by reason of her cleanliness, the 
substantial character of her modern buildings, and 
the efficiency of her municipal government she is 
termed the "Edinburgh of the Baltic." Stockholm 
is more scientifically advanced, and more modernly 
wide-awake than are the German and English cities 
of to-day. She has a fine and bountiful water supply, 
an elaborate and efficient telephone system, and is 
probably more thoroughly and effectively illuminated 
by electricity than any city in Europe. The older 
quarters of the city are well paved and scrupulously 
clean ; in the newer sections are blocks of stately build- 
ings of modern design, and wide boulevards and ave- 
nues paved with asphalt and squares of stone. Her 
public buildings, her numerous Plats and Tot^gs and 
lovely parks are all exquisitely kept. 

We spent one delightful morning crossing the 
wide stone bridge of Norrbro, and viewing the Royal 




THE CATHEDRAL OF Rl DDARSHOLM. 



STOCKHOLM, THE CHURCH OF RIDDARSHOLM. 131 

Palace, the State Apartments, and Royal Library, 
and the fine old church of Riddarsholm, which is 
the "Westminster Abbey of Sweden, her Pantheon, 
where lie entombed the bones of Gustavus Adolphus 
and the ashes of Charles XII, and members of the 
House of Vasa, along with other illustrious Swedes. 
The old church is of red brick, topped by a curious 
wrought-iron steeple, and is the shrine to which come 
all patriotic Swedes, there to contemplate the departed 
glories of their fatherland. 

Of an afternoon, we visited the famous Djur- 
gaard (deer park) and then went on to the park 
called Skansen, where are gathered a most inter- 
esting collection illustrative of the ancient Swedish 
way of living, as well as examples of the ancient in- 
dustries, exemplified by charming lively peasant 
girls clad in their divers Provincial costumes. We 
then also climbed the tower set upon the hill, whence 
spread out before us a superb vista of the city and 
its many islands and surrounding waters, and wide- 
sweeping woods and forests. We also crossed among 
the islands upon dapper electric launches which ferry 
between, and then came back to dine in a fashionable 
restaurant under the Grand Hotel near the quay, 
where were small tables, and where sat men in dress 
coats and handsome women in evening dress — gen- 
erally high-necked — and we were given fresh straw- 
berries — this September 13th — and savory mutton 
chops and fresh-grown peas, and fruits and ices. 



132 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

The streets at all hours of the day and evening 
were astir and gay. The many officers in blue and 
gray uniforms, patterned after the German styles, 
the Daleearlian girls in their picturesque bright barred 
aprons and braided hair, carrying packages and 
bundles — ^the messenger boys of the North — the blue- 
eyed and yellow-haired men and women neatly and 
soberly clad, and the absence of all beggars — we did 
not come across a single one, — ^the multitude of boats, 
great and small, constantly moving rapidly up and 
down and across the many lanes of water, all these 
gave animation to the city. 

The streets of Stockholm are filled with women, 
more like the German towns, while, just as there, 
scores of sturdy men stand idly around decked 
out in soldier's uniform. Rosy-cheeked young 
women wait upon you in the restaurants; women 
armed with big brooms sweep at the crossings ; women 
come in from the country driving carts loaded with 
produce of the farm; and women also largely "man" 
the small boats that ply along the waters between the 
islands. Woman is here as greatly in evidence as she 
is in Boston, but of a huskier, heartier type. 

Visiting the markets, I found a great profusion of 
strawberries, whortleberries, blueberries and others I 
did not know, and withal, most of the vegetables my 
Kanawha garden would yield in June. These fruits 
of tree and soil are brought into the city by chunky 
native horses hitched to little two-wheeled carts, which 
horses, when they reach their destination, are securely 



A SWEDISH COFFEE HOUSE. 133 

halted by a strap or line passed around their two 
fore fetlocks, tying the feet tight together, a treat- 
ment an American horse would scarcely endure. 

Another day H and I wandered across the Norrbro 
and beyond the Palace and down near the Storkyrko 
Brink, and discovered a curious little coffeehouse, 
tucked away up a flight of creaking stairs, in an 
ancient building which seemed to be a counting-house 
below and offices above. Here were set against the walls 
little mahogany tables holding three and four, where 
plates were laid without a cloth, and ale and beer were, 
served in tall pewter mugs. We called for the foam- 
ing brown brew and asked for roed spoette, our 
old Danish joy, and lunched delightfully. The room 
was filled with big, burly, red-cheeked men, merchants 
and sea captains, H thought, from what bits of con- 
versation she could pick up. A most substantial com- 
pany they were, who evidently came here to strike 
weighty bargains as well as to eat and drink and 
smoke. We were doubtless lunching in a well-known 
and most ancient rendezvous, much like the historic 
grill room I discovered in London, called **Toms,'* 
where Dickens' and Mr. Pickwick's chairs are shown 
to the visitor, and the waiter will inform you on just 
what sort of kidney broil and roasted sausage each 
made his daily meal. 

Stockhobn divides with Copenhagen the honors of 
being the metropolis of the Scandinavian world, boldly 
asserting her superiority over Kristiania, for she is 
the larger city. She is easily first in Sweden in all 



134 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

save scholarship and learning — in that, Upsala, the 
Cornell and Harvard of the North, holds unrivaled 
lead. 

The fine stores and shops, along such streets as the 
Dronning Gatan and Regerings Gatan and adja- 
cent thoroughfares, H declares quite equal to those 
of Copenhagen ; while in an ancient and narrow alley- 
way she discovered a perfect mint of embroideries 
and linens, articles of feminine apparel which rejoice 
her heart. 

On our last evening we attended the Royal Opera, 
occupying a box quite to ourselves, where we heard 
good singing and well-rendered music by the Royal 
Band, beheld a fashionably-dressed and intelligent- 
looking audience, and were stared at by old King 
Oscar who sat rigid in his box, and glared at us with 
a mighty black opera-glass until he had studied each 
feature of the stranger guests, and by his persistence 
thereby directed upon us the curiosity of every other 
pair of opera glasses in the house. The example of 
the King was quite in accordance with Continental 
custom, where the glare of opera-glasses is astonish- 
ingly bold. Nor does the impudent stare stop at that, 
but in Stockholm, just as in Paris and Berlin, between 
the acts very many of the men rise up, put on their 
hats, turn their backs to the stage, and deliberately 
focus their glasses upon the faces of every attractive 
woman in the theater, no matter how near she may 
be, nor how annoying this treatment may appear ; and 
often two or three young men will then compare notes, 



THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES. 135 

and unite in a common stare, bold and insolent. To 
avoid this unpleasant ordeal, ladies very generally 
rise from their seats, leave the theater and promenade 
in the foyers until the curtain rises and the impudent 
glasses are put down. 

We have secured tickets and berths for the 
voyage to St. Petersburg across the Baltic Sea and 
Gulf of Finland. We sail to-night, and are to arrive 
on Tuesday morning, a voyage of three nights and 
two days, a distance of six hundred miles. 

We have now visited the three capitals of Scandi- 
navia, Copenhagen, Kristiania and Stockholm, and 
have spent a month among these kindred peoples. 

While I had learned in America to esteem the vigor, 
the intelligence and the worth of our Scandinavian 
immigration, no finer race contributing to the citizen- 
ship of the Republic, yet it has been only when I have 
met the Dane and Norsk and Swede upon their native 
soil, and beheld their noble cities, so alert and clean 
and modern, and traversed their hills and valleys, and 
climbed their mountain heights and floated upon their 
fjords, that I have learned fitly to admire and ap- 
preciate the grandeur and greatness of Scandinavia. 



How We Entered Russia — The Passpott System — 

Difficult to Get Into Russia and More 

Difficult to Get Out. 

St. Petersburg, Russia, September 16, 1902. 

It is not easy to get into Russia; it is yet more 
difficult to get out. 

Before leaving the United States, I had taken due 
precautions and secured a passport from the State 
Department, signed by Secretary Hay, with the Great 
Seal of the United States upon it. In that passport 
I was described. I had also provided myself with a 
special letter from the State Department, in which all 
consuls and officials of the United States in foreign 
lands had been bidden to pay particular heed to my 
welfare, for I was vouched for as a worthy and re- 
spected citizen of the Republic. 

I presumed that, armed with these credentials, I 
should find all doors and gateways open to my passage. 
I assumed that the autocracy of the Russian Empire 
would be delighted to welcome a citizen of the great 
Republic, so well accredited. Imagine my surprise, 
when I presented myself at the ticket office of the 
Russian steamship line, by which we would travel to 

(136) 



THE PASSPORT SYSTEM. 137 

St. Petersburg, and was refused a ticket because I did 
not then have my passport in hand, so that the ticket- 
seller might duly scrutinize it ! An hour later, when 
I again presented myself with the passport and laid 
down the coin, I was a second time refused. The pass- 
port had not been certified by the American Minister 
in Stockholm, our port of departure, nor had it been 
viseed by the Russian Consul General of the port. 

I immediately drove to the American Ministry, a 
mile away, where the Swedish clerk endorsed my pass- 
port as being genuine, and gave me a note to the 
Russian official. A drive of another mile brought me to 
a tall stone building, above the door of which reposed 
the Imperial Eagle. Ascending two flights of stairs, I 
was shown into a small ante-room, and, after waiting 
some time, was ushered into a large, well-lighted 
chamber, where a big, round-headed, bearded man, in 
Russian uniform, sat at a long table. He was writing. 
He did not deign to look up. After standing some 
moments before this important personage, I called his 
attention in my best French, to the fact that I was 
there. Still he made no reply, but kept on writing. 
I noticed that he was nearly to the bottom of the 
page; when he had finished it, he looked up and in- 
quired in German what I wanted. I replied in Ger- 
man that I called upon him to have my passport viseed, 
and handed him the document and the note. He read 
the latter and looked at the former, but the descrip- 
tion of my person was in English and he was evi- 
dently stumped. He gazed at me and the paper, took 



138 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

up a metal stamp, pressed it on an ink pad, made on 
the passport the imprint of some Russian characters; 
signed his name to them, and advised me that I was 
his debtor to the extent of twenty kroners (about five 
dollars) . He then turned again to his writing. 

I had thus spent three hours in driving about the 
city, visiting these officials, and now hurried to the 
steamship office, where on presenting my passport 
duly viseed, I at last obtained the tickets. Upon board- 
ing the ship, at a later hour, we were notified to call 
at the Captain's office and surrender our passports, 
which were then once more verified, along with our 
tickets, before we cast off from the pier. 

We left Stockholm about eight o'clock in the even- 
ing. We were a party of four, — H and myself, 
and the two delightful friends whom we met that 
day at Maristuen, at the head of the Laera Dal, 
in Norway, The suggestions then first made had 
ripened into a definite plan, and we agreed to join 
forces for our journey through Russia. Our friends 
were Mr. and Mrs. Condit, of Chicago, and we found 
their ready western wit and genial fellowship on more 
than one occasion of most signal aid. 

We crossed the Baltic Sea in the night, and touched 
at the Russian port of Hangoe, in Finland, early 
Sunday morning. Here I noticed a messenger in uni- 
form leave the ship bearing a long iron box heavily 
padlocked, and was informed that this box contained 
the passports of the passengers, which he was to take 
to St, Petersburg by a special Imperial train that 



CROSSING THE BALTIC SEA. 139 

would put him there in twenty-three hours, when the 
passports would be immediately filed with the police 
department, verified, recorded and given to certain 
other officials who would meet our ship on its arrival 
at the mouth of the river Neva on Tuesday morning, 
and who would examine and scrutinize us and then 
return them to us. If in the meantime, we should 
happen to change our minds and want to remain a 
few days in Finland, say at Helsingfors, we would be 
liable to arrest for not having our passports now gone 
to St. Petersburg. We might not change our minds 
or alter our itinerary. It was now St. Petersburg or 
jail. 

The twilight was just fading into night when we 
cast off from the pier and slowly made our way 
among the islands. The sail down the narrow chan- 
nel to the sea was in the light of the full moon. The 
myriad electric lights of the city were blazing be- 
hind us. We passed the black hulls of many vessels 
anchored in the harbor, and in turn were passed by 
scores of little boats, with a big light on the foremast, 
which were scurrying about carrying passengers be- 
tween the islands. Along the wooded shores were 
villas and country-seats, and ever and anon, there 
seemed to be open clearings and farms, and then we 
came into the blackness of wide waters. We were out 
upon the Baltic Sea. 

In the morning we were among more islands; the 
Aaland Archipelago; we had had only two hours of 
the open sea. The sun was behind a mass of scudding 



140 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

clouds, gray and threatening; and great banks of 
blacker clouds were rolling up from the south. A gale 
was blowing — a furious gale — ^which drove the waters 
and whirling foam wherever open space allowed. The 
wind was bitterly cold, and grew ever colder, while 
higher and higher rose the tempest. We were in 
great danger, although at the time I did not know it. 

The steering of the Swedish pilots was skillful, 
and the little ship obeyed the helm perfectly, swing- 
ing round sharp points, and traversing narrow chan- 
nels where, even in quiet waters, it is dangerous to 
navigate. 

About noon we slipped in between two rocky islets, 
scarcely a cable-tow's length apart, rising only a few 
feet above the level of the sea, and turning sharp to 
port came into the rock-bound harbor of Hangoe, 
a town of Finland, whence the railway goes on to Hels- 
ingfors and St. Petersburg. 

The gale now grew into a tornado with deluges of 
rain, a storm so fierce that, until it should subside, 
the Captain refused to leave the protection of the port. 

Thus we lay-to at Hangoe until the dawn of the fol- 
lowing day, when we cast off from the long pier and 
plunged once more among the islands of the Archi- 
pelago. Hundreds of islands there were, barren and 
uninhabited, the big ones covered with dwarf birches, 
a few stunted pines and firs, the lesser islets thick 
with tangled grasses, or more .often bare of all except 
lichens and gray moss, the vegetation of a desolate, 
wintry latitude. 




FACING THE GALE. 



HELSINGFORS. 141 

The wind was now somewhat abated, but not so the 
sea. It was angry, stirred to its depths. It was 
a bad day for a landsman, — a bad day even for 
an old salt. Two stalwart seamen stood ever at the 
wheel in addition to the pilot and our Captain, and it 
took all their combined strength and skill to save us 
from certain wreck. The conflicting currents churned 
and swirled with maelstrom violence, while we crept 
steadily on among the shoals and sunken bars and 
hidden reefs. 

It was long past noon when we swung round a bold 
rocky point, and saw before us Finland's capital, 
HeLsingfors. The city surrounds the harbor much 
like a crescent. On either horn, granite prom- 
ontories jut out into the sea, where are fortifications, 
one of them the formidable fortress of Sveaborg, 
where we could see brown-coated Cossacks gathered 
in large numbers watching our entrance to the port. 
A great garrison there seemed to be, and everywhere 
floated the Russian flag, — parallel stripes of white, 
blue and red. Russian troops not merely man all 
these fortifications, but there are also soldiers with- 
in the city itself, and more are quartered in every 
village of consequence in Finland. The ancient Sen- 
ate and House of Chevaliers are no longer permitted 
to enact the laws. A Russian Governor-General is- 
sues his Ukases, which the Russian bayonets are here 
savagely to enforce. All this you already know, but 
it comes vividly upon one when you see the Cossack, 
clad in his long kaftan-like military coat, everywhere 



142 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

about you visible evidence of bow barshly Finland has 
been stripped of her rights and liberties. 

Helsingfors astonished us. Lying upon a rising 
slope, it presents an imposing outline from the sea. 
It is a city of ninety-six thousand people. "We were 
not prepared for so large and substantial a city. It 
has well-kept parks, well-paved streets, frequently 
asphalted as in Stockholm, and blocks of big granite 
buildings five and six stories high; the city is clean, 
and the streets are alive with well-dressed, rosy- 
cheeked, vigorous people. Everywhere there are elec- 
tric tram-cars and electric lights, and on the broad 
thoroughfares are large and handsome shops. It is 
evident that in the Finnish hinterlands there is an 
extensive and well-to-do population. 

Our ship was to lie at her pier for several hours, 
and the passengers were told that they might safely 
visit the town; if arrested for not having pass- 
ports, we might refer to the Captain of the ship. So 
we wandered up along the quays, following a wide 
boulevard. Everyivhere on the sidewalks and driv- 
ing through the streets were Russian officials in their 
long gray coats and flat black caps; there were also 
many soldiers upon the streets. 

Finland was once a province of Sweden, and the 
Teutonic Swedish language is yet that of the educated 
classes, who are chiefly of Swedish descent. In the 
country, however, and among the working classes, 
there remains the original population of primitive 
Finnish race, "The old Finns," cousins to the Hun- 




FISHING BOATS ALONG THE QUAY, HELSINGFORS. 








'ji^lW 



THE PIER, HELSINGFORS. 



HELSINGFORS. 143 

garians, and these have a Turanian language of their 
own. They have accepted for centuries the Swedish 
rule and fraternized with the Swedish leaders, but 
have held to their ancient tongue. Now is also the 
Slavonic Russian speech, by Ukase, commanded to be 
the language of the schools, of the courts and of the 
government. Thus the Finlander must be acquainted 
with three fundamentally different tongues, and all 
of the streets of Helsingfors are named in the three 
languages on the same placard. The Russian name is 
in Greek text, then in Latin text the Swedish name, 
and under that the native Finnish name; thus there 
is much babel of tongues in Helsingfors, while all the 
Finlanders bitterly resent the brutal attempt to sub- 
stitute the Russian for their own. 

Finland has, also, heretofore been privileged to 
coin her own money, — but now the Russian ruble is 
supreme. "We had boarded a tram-car, as modern 
and comfortable as those of New York, and were 
whirling along the boulevard, when we tendered the 
conductor our fare in Russian coin (we had provided 
ourselves with ''kopeeks" and rubles before leaving 
Stockholm), but he declined to take the money. He 
was about to stop the car and put us off, when a 
courtly-mannered Finn, addressing the passengers as 
well as the conductor, explained that, under the pres- 
ent laws, Russian money must be taken when ten- 
dered, and that we were entitled to ride, — ^so H tells 
me, who understood his speech, so much is it like the 
Danish. But the conductor, patriot that he was, re- 



144 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

fused to touch the ruble I offered him, preferring to 
let us ride without making charge. If I had been able 
to do so, I would have explained to our fellow-pas- 
sengers that I intended no insult, and would thus 
probably have restored myself to their confidence. As 
it was they glowered at me as a friend of hated Russia. 

We visited the splendid Parliament buildings, where 
the Finnish Senate and House of Chevaliers have 
been wont to meet, — ^now closed forever by the Ukase 
of the Czar. I understand, also, that the Finnish 
judges have recently been deposed from the courts, 
And Russians appointed in their stead; and we were 
told by a friendly Finn that so completely are the 
people terrorized, that no patriot dare give open evi- 
dence of opposition to the Russian rule. One may 
only detect it by the sullen, disquieted faces of the 
people one meets upon the streets. In the dour 
glances cast at the Russian officials I saw everywhere 
expression of hatred and revenge.* 

It was middle afternoon when we set sail again. 
No other vessel dared leave the port, but our Captain, 
being anxious to reach St. Petersburg, decided to 
venture on the voyage. As soon as we emerged from 
the protecting barriers of the islands at the harbor's 
mouth, we came into open waters. A furious sea 
was running and the ship rolled heavily. She 
plunged and reared and pitched, until most of the 

*The reverses of the Japanese War, the assassination 
of Governor BobrikofE and threat of revolution have at last 
frightened the Russian Autocracy into partially restoring 
to Finland her pillaged liberties. 




THE DOEBLN AT HER PIER, HELSINGFORS. 




MARKET SQUARE, HELSINGFORS. 



THE GULF OF FINLAND. 145 

passengers were driven to their staterooms, — indeed, 
so mad was now the sea that we were told there would 
be no more hot coffee and hot steak, since the cooks 
in the kitchen could not keep their legs, nor could 
dishes be set upon the tipping tables. Those who were 
able to eat might get a snack from the steward, who 
would hand it out — cold fish and cheese at that. The 
boat rolled until her gunwales were awash, and 
frequently the roaring waters swept across the decks. 
Although it was a wild and dangerous night, yet the 
clouds were parting and the stars were out. No 
grander panorama of the sea have I looked upon 
than these mighty foam-capped billows — greater even 
than our ship, — between which we hid, and on the 
summits of which we climbed, — the angry, pitch-black 
waters, the star-lit firmament, and the serene moon 
shining with fullest splendor. 

At dawn on Tuesday morning, we passed the great 
naval fortification of Kronstadt, and three hours 
later, after threading our way among fishing boats, 
were entering the canal which leads from the gulf of 
Finland to the river Neva and the city of St. Peters- 
burg. 

South and east of us, behind low shores, the land 

stretched away green and flat as far as the eye could 

see, an apparently indefinitely extending plain. Only 

the glint of a gilded oriental dome, the bulbous cupola 

of a Russian village church, lightened here and there 

the green monotony. Then far to the east we saw not 

one but many domes glittering and flashing in the 
10 



146 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

light of the lifting sun — the gilded towers of the cathe- 
drals and churches of the city of St. Petersburg — 
then we saw a tangle of tall chimneys, then ships and 
barks and schooners and enormous barges from Lake 
Ladoga, and immense docks on either side. We were 
upon the river Neva. We were come to the city of 
"Petersborg," the splendid capital of the Russian 
Czars. 

Just as we were entering the canal, a steam-tug 
came up alongside us and a company of government 
officials in long gray coats climbed on board. They 
were the customs inspectors and officers of the police 
department. The two chief officials seated themselves 
at a long table. An officer of the ship directed the 
passengers to form in a queue, and one by one we 
appeared before the official examiner, while the Cap- 
tain called off our names, reading the list from a little 
book. When my name was announced a clerk handed 
one of the officials a passport. It was numbered — 
my name was upon it — it had been received in St. 
Petersburg from the messenger who left Hangoe Sun- 
day morning; — it had been filed with the police de- 
partment ; it had been viseed; it had been translated 
into Russian, and the official now read over the de- 
scription to his assistants; — I was scrutinized, — ^the 
passport was found correct — ^the officials so endorsed 
it and handed it to me. The passenger immediately 
behind me, seemingly, did not correspond with his 
passport, and was directed to stand to one side. There 
were a number of these, who were to have a difficult 




A WILD SEA— LEAVING HELSINGFORS. 




FISHING BOATS, MOUTH OF RIVER NEVA. 



ENTERING THE RIVER NEVA. 147 

time with the authorities. Our baggage was also ex- 
amined, but not closely. With the Russian official the 
main thing is the passport, not the baggage. 

We were now arrived at the pier and were ready to 
go ashore. Two sailors carried our small steamer 
trunk upon the wharf, and we were in St. Petersburg. 
Instantly we were surrounded by a howling mob 
of bearded, blond-headed, dressing-gown-coated men, 
clamoring for our fares. They were izvostchiks in 
their native kaftans. I beckoned to one of them, and 
pointed to our trunk. He lifted it to his shoulder and 
led us to his droschky, — a diminutive open vehicle, 
much like a small sledge on wheels. We entered it 
and in a moment were galloping through the streets 
of the city, the driver constantly shouting to his horse 
and yelling to all foot-farers to get out of the way. 
I gave him the name of our destination. Hotel de 
r Europe. He seemed to comprehend my meaning, 
and never drew rein until we stopped before the im- 
posing entrance of that hostelry. 

We were in Russia. We had run the gauntlet of 
the border, — our passports had been sufficient, and we 
were at last safely within the dominions of the Czar. 
Would it be as difficult to get out ? 



xvn* 

St. Peter sbar g — The Gteat Wealth of the Few — ^The 

Bitter Poverty of the Many — Conditions Similar 

to Those Preceding the French Revolution.* 

Grand Hotel de l 'Europe, 
St. Petersburg, Russia, 
September 18 {N. S.), 1902. 
So much has been jammed into the last two days 
that my pen is like to burst. Splendor and squalor, 
the glitter of twentieth century civilization, the sombre 
shadow of barbarism, are here entwined in inextricable 
comminglement. The city is filled with stately build- 
ings of gigantic and imposing dimensions; with wide, 
straight boulevards and streets. The sidewalks and 
droschkies are gay with the dashing and gaudy uni- 
forms of innumerable soldiery, and the fine dresses of 
elegant women. Yet many of these great buildings are 
in ill repair, and what you at first imagine to be mag- 
nificent stone, reveals itself to be a stucco of rotting 
wood and crumbling plaster ; the broad thoroughfares 
are abominably paved, and pitifully cared for by ab- 
ject wretches wielding dilapidated birch-stick brooms. 

*These letters were written in the early autumn of the 
year, 1902, and present a glimpse of Russia as it then 
appeared. 

(148) 




ENTERING THE NEVA. 




ALONG THE NEVA. 



ST. PETERSBURG. 149 

The superb horses — stallions, all of them — whirl 
past, driven by izvostchiks in dirty, truncated plug- 
hats and blue dressing-gown-like kaftans, whose 
sodden faces tell of vodka and hopeless haplessness. 
Beggars swarm (frightful creatures), and the faces 
of the officers, fine big men in striking uniforms, are 
dissipated, hard and cruel. 

We are in a huge hotel. Big men in uniform open 
the door; big men in livery fill the halls; the rooms 
are big, ours is immense, with double windows. It 
is steam-heated, and also has hearth fires of burning 
wood. The building is warmed all through, even the 
halls. There are French waiters in the big dining- 
rooms; there is delicious food and delightful coffee, 
whose aroma is very perfume of the Orient ; the beef- 
steaks are juicy, thick and tender. We have had no 
such meals since leaving America. On each story 
there is an elaborate bar for serving vodka (a fierce 
white whisky distilled from wheat) and drinks to the 
guests of that particular floor, and a single bath room, 
and a single diminutive toilet for both sexes' common 
use. 

The moment we set foot within the doorway of the 
hotel, up stepped an official, in blue and gold, and 
demanded our passports, and we were requested also 
to sign a paper like the one enclosed, viz. : 



150 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

NOTICE TO THE POLICE. 

Family and Christian where is your passport? 

Name : Signature : 

Profession : Please order your passport 

Age: two days before leaving 

Confession : Russia, 

Arrived from 



This to be at once filed with the police department, 
and the passport not to be given back until we should 
notify the same big official, — ^whose duty it was to stay 
right there and watch all guests of that hotel, and 
who must be notified twenty-four hours before we 
leave the city, — ^when he will return the passport two 
hours before the said time set, and give it to me only 
upon my paying him the government fee of ten rubles 
(five dollars) in good yellow gold.* And right outside 
the door of our apartments, seated at a little table, are 
two officials, pen and paper in hand, who set down the 
hour and the minute of the day we enter and come out. 
They were there when we went to breakfast ; they, or 
others as fox-jowled and lynx-eyed, were also there 
when we returned from the theater late at night, and 
they are there all through the day. Our Swedish guide, 
who does the duties of courier and shows us about the 
great city, is also registered at the police department, 
and he has to hand in every night a written report of 

*I have subsequently learned that the legal fee is about 
three rubles ($1.50), the charge of ten rubles being impu- 
dent graft. 




ALONG THE NEVSKY-PROSPEKT. 




OUR DROSCHKY, ST. PETERSBURG. 



ST, PETERSBURG. 151 

what he has done with us all through the day, where 
we have gone, what we have seen, and we suspect even 
what we may have said. On the streets, big sword- 
begirded policemen stand at the intersections of the 
ways, pull out a little book from their pockets and 
make note of our passing that particular spot at that 
certain hour; at night these reports also are handed 
in to the central police office to be checked up against 
the statements of the guide and the spies at the hotel. 
We are in the capital city of the mighty Russian 
Empire; in the capital created by Peter the Great 
amidst and upon the marshy delta of the river Neva ; 
a city of more than a million inhabitants; a city 
spread out over vast distances; a city whose dispro- 
portionately wide streets and boulevards are paved 
with wood, wood that is rotting all the while, leaving 
big holes into which a horse, a team, may plunge and 
disappear, because only wood will float upon the 
marshy mire of the mucky islets, and stone and brick 
will eventually sink from sight; a city whose top- 
heavy palaces and public edifices are so treacherously 
set upon the sands that they must constantly 
undergo costly repairs; a city builded upon foun- 
dations so unstable that the springtime floods 
of the river Neva ever threaten permanently to wipe 
out its very existence; a city where the palaces of 
the always widening circle of the Imperial princes 
of the blood, and of the upper nobility, and of the 
great bureaucratic chiefe, are builded with an ar- 
rogance of dimension, an elaborateness of design, a 



152 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

lavishness of cost that beats anything an American 
billionaire has ever tried to do, or dreamed of do- 
ing in San Francisco or New York; and yet a city 
abounding in the mean, small, log and wooden 
cabins of the very poor; a city where penury and 
poverty and dire pinch protrude their squalid pres- 
ence in continual tragic protest against the flaunted 
and wanton riot of unmeasured wealth, possessed by 
the very few. 

This morning as I walked upon the Nevsky Pros- 
pekt, the Broadway of the Imperial capital, and 
watched the movement of mankind along the way, 
and beheld the extraordinary contrasts between those 
who walked and those who rode; as I saw the burly 
policeman arrest the shabby foot-farer for nearly 
being run down, while he let the haughty grandee 
drive freely on; as I beheld poverty and wealth in 
such flagrant contrast, and realized that a standing 
army is kept ever armed and girt to protect and 
uphold the privilege and security of the rich ; as I be- 
held the surly, sour, sombre faces of those who wore 
no gaudy covering of broadcloth and gold lace, my 
fancy harked back to the time, somewhat more than 
a century ago, when the King and Nobles of France 
drove through the Rues of Paris in all their glittering 
splendor, trampling down in their pride of power 
the pedestrian who failed to escape from their 
sudden approach. How secure they felt in their 
arrogant enjoyment of prerogative and rank! How 
contemptuously they disdained the humble claims of 



ST. PETERSBURG. 153 

the gutter-proletarian, of the peasant on the land! 
Louis XIV had cried ''L'etat c'est moi." Was that 
not enough ! And yet, I had stood in the Place de la 
Concorde, almost on the very spot where, inspired by 
the hatred of the Sansculottes, Mademoiselle La 
Guillotine had bit off the dull head of Louis XVI, and 
cut through the fair throat of Marie Antoinette, 

It may be possible for Russia and her governing 
men, her Bureaucratic Autocracy, yet a little while to 
postpone the fateful hour. By means of foreign wars 
it may be possible to play the old game of diverting 
the public mind from its own bitter ills ; by promises of 
fair and liberal dealing it may be possible to calm the 
public mind — cajole it until the promises are duly 
broken, as is invariably the case. Whatever fair- 
speaking and fat-feeding officialdom may to the con- 
trary assert, the impression I gain amidst all this 
splendor and pomp and glare of supreme, concen- 
tered power of the few is that, beneath this opulent 
exterior, deep down in the hearts and even below the 
conscious working of their minds, there to-day abides 
among the masses of the Russian people — who after 
all hold in their hands the final power — o, profound 
and monstrous discontent: a discontent so deep- 
rooted and so intense that when the inevitable hour 
strikes, as strike it must, the world will then behold 
in Russia a saturnalia of blood and tears, a squaring 
of ten centuries' accounts, more fraught with human 
anguish and human joy than ever dreamed a Marat 



154 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

and a Robespierre, more direful and more glad than 
yet mankind have known. 

We drove about the city like grandees. Our landau 
was just such as Russian nobles like best to use ; our 
splendid pair of sorrel stallions pranced upon their 
heels and neighed and ran just as all nobles' horses 
should; and our well-distended driver, of enormous 
and deftly-padded girth, sat belted with a big 
embroidered band, and guided the horses he never 
dreamed to hold, and helloed loudly to those who did 
not fly out of the way, just as would any driver of the 
Blood! We almost ran over some slow-moving man 
or woman, foot-weary wretch, at every crossing of a 
street ! 

Many palaces and public buildings we visited — 
enormous edifices, all of them, with innumerable and 
extensive halls and immense chambers finished in gold 
and alabaster and gaudy hues, with countless servants 
and lackeys in livery and lace, gold lace, to care for 
them, and watch over them, and fatten upon a govern- 
ment graft or easy-gotten fee. Suites of enormous 
apartments they were, which are never used and never 
are likely to be used. 

The paintings of the great masters collected in the 
galleries of the Hermitage and Winter Palaces, ac- 
cumulated by the Czars, are among the most renowned 
in Europe. The reception halls and audience cham- 
bers and ballrooms and dining halls of these palaces 
are designed and intended to dazzle and impress 
whosoever are given the chance of beholding them. 




OUR SQUEALING STALLIONS. 




CATHEDRAL OF OUR LADY OF KAZAN. 



ST. PETERSBURG, 155 

At the same time, the library and study of the late 
Czar, Alexander III, is a small and plainly furnished 
room, with the atmosphere and markings of a man 
of simple tastes, who laboriously worked, worked as 
no other official of the Bureaucracy in Russia pre- 
tends to work. 

We traversed the suites of apartments used by the 
Imperial family, when sojourning in St. Petersburg 
during those portions of the winter season when the 
court there gathers, and we noted the outer guard- 
rooms where night and day stand the faithful watch- 
ers with sleepless vigil, and we realized, perhaps for the 
first time, that this man, so steeped in power, is after 
all but a prisoner of the system which locks him in 
and binds him fast and robs him of that independence 
of action which you and I enjoy. He is become but 
a creature of the great machine that governs, a slave 
of the system which Peter the Great set up for the 
furtherance of his Imperial will, a system of govern- 
ment which has so developed and spread out that to- 
day the Czar of all the Russias is merely the puppet 
of its will, the tool of the greedy, grasping, intrigu- 
ing, governing Bureaucracy. 

On approaching the city, our straining eyes first 
caught sight of the gilded, glittering domes and spires 
of the great cathedrals and churches with which it is 
so abundantly supplied. The domes of St. Isaac, of 
our Lady of Kazan, of Alexander Nevsky, and the 
spires of St, Peter and St. Paul, each and all told 
us that whatever else we might discover, we were yet 



156 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

entering a city and a land where the people counted 
not the cost of the splendid housing of their faith. 
And so we have found it. The wealth of gold and of 
silver, of precious stones and of priceless stuffs with 
which these churches are adorned and crammed, ex- 
cels anything of which the western brain has 
ever dreamed. Each great church is famed and 
honored for its particular beneficence, its peculiar 
holiness, and to each one comes in procession per- 
petual an innumerable throng to pray and worship 
and to receive the blessings flowing from that especial 
fane. Even in the ancient log cabin, said to be the 
actual house erected by Peter himself, is established 
a shrine, where priests continuously intone the beauti- 
ful service of the Russian church and where thousands 
of devoted worshipers swarm in and out all the day 
long, and the night as well, praying to Imperial 
Peter's now sainted ghost. 

In the noble chamber of the golden-spired 
cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul lie the white 
marble tombs of the Eomanoffs, where is also kept 
up throughout the day and night yet another sumptu- 
ous service for the repose of the souls of the illustrious 
dead. In the great monastery of Alexander Nevsky is 
each day maintained a simple and splendid choral 
service which multitudes attend, and where the melan- 
choly Gregorian chanting and intoning of the black- 
robed long-bearded monks reveal new organ stops in 
the human voice. 

Naturally, an American has great sympathy for 




OUR IZVOSTCHIK. 



ST. PETERSBURG. 157 

the Russian people who have so little, while he has 
so much. In America we send our girls and boys to 
school as a matter of course. Here in the ornate center 
of autocracy, I have seen no building that I recognized 
as a common school, nor in Russia is there such a sys- 
tem, as we know it. 

To the western mind three things stand out above 
all else in Russia : 

(1) The concentrated wealth and privilege of the 
few — ^the big grafters who have seized it all. 

(2) The opulence and extraordinary power of that 
ecclesiastical organization, the "Holy Orthodox 
Church," itself an engine of the autocratic rule, — 
used to cover atrocious authority with gilded cassock 
and priestly cope. 

(3) The profound poverty and hopeless subservi- 
ency of the Russian people — those who are robbed and 
ruined by the grafters and hoodooed by the Church. 



xvm. 

En Route to Moscow — ^Undcr Military Guard — Sus- 
pected of Designs on Life of the Csar. 

Moscow, Russia, September 19, 1902, 10 P. M. 
We took the Imperial Mail train as determined. 
Foreign travelers generally journey by the night ex- 
press, which arrives at Moscow only an hour behind 
the Imperial Mail, but it leaves St. Petersburg at so 
late an hour that there is little chance to see the 
country traversed. We made up our minds to take 
the more democratic train, which goes in the middle 
afternoon and stops at all way-stations. This would 
give us an opportunity to see more of the people as 
well as a longer season of daylight to watch the pass- 
ing panorama of the land. We knew no reason why 
we should not take the train of our choice. It was 
true that our guide urged us to go by the night ex- 
press. It was also true, when I presented my pass- 
port to the ticket agent at the Railway station, the 
day before, and requested tickets, that he advised us 
to make the journey by the night express, nor would 
he at first agree to sell us tickets by the Imperial Mail, 
but told us to come back again two hours later, when 
he would let us know whether there were any berths 

(158) 



LEAVING ST. PETERSBURG. 15i> 

unsold in the train's through sleeper. It was also 
true that when we returned, he again advised us to 
take the night express. But our minds were made 
up, and we at last secured the tickets we wanted, and 
became entitled to an entire stateroom upon a desig- 
nated car. 

When we left the Hotel de 1 'Europe, the govern- 
ment official to whom I had returned my passport^ 
after having bought my tickets, emerged from his 
office, received graciously his ten rubles, and again 
handed me the document; the sundry flunkies in 
liveries and spies in uniforms obsequiously bowed 
us out of the establishment, and our very competent 
guide immediately packed us into several droschkies 
and galloped us along the Nevsky Prospekt to the 
huge government station of the railway running to 
Moscow. The instant our izvostchiks brought their 
horses to a stop, we were surrounded by a swarm of 
porters clad in white tunic aprons and flat caps, who 
seized our bags, and preceded us through the large 
waitingroom to the gates admitting to the train plat- 
form. Here our tickets were scrutinized, and a group 
of uniformed officials, who seemed to be awaiting us, 
informed us that the car in which our stateroom 
had been sold being already filled, another stateroom 
in another car was placed at our disposal. They 
then led the way to the front of the long train, and 
showed us into a large combined sleeper-and-chair 
car immediately back of the engine. Several soldiers 
were standing guard near by. We were evidently ex- 



160 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

pected and were especially provided for. We almost 
had the car to ourselves. The only other passengers 
were a Russian officer and his orderly. We were at 
the head of a train made up mostly of mail cars 
locked and sealed, having at the rear several passenger 
coaches. But we were separated from all these latter, 
and we seemed to be objects of unusual interest. 
Many strange faces flattened against our windows, 
peering in at us, and the orderly locked up with us 
never took his eyes away from us. This did not annoy 
me, however, for I presumed he was admiring the 
beauty of our American women. 

The train was a long one, — and such huge cars. The 
Russian gauge is five feet, the ears are long, and half 
as big and wide again as are the American cars, and 
are heated by steam, having double windows prepared 
against the cold. We had secured a whole compart- 
ment in which the two seats, facing each other, pull 
out and the backs lift up, making four berths, two 
lower, two upper, placed cross-wise. You pay one 
ruhle (fifty cents) for blankets, sheets and towels. 
We put H and Mrs. C in the lower berths. Mr. 
C and I took the uppers. The car had only two 
more staterooms, one on each side of our own, and 
then a large drawing-room with reclining chairs. The 
stateroom ahead of us was occupied by the officer; 
his orderly slept on a chair in the salon. In the state- 
room behind us were two railway guards. After we 
entered the ear, the door was closed and locked by 
an official who stood on the outside. The officer and 





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A NOBLE'S TROIKA. 




THE RAILWAY P0RTER3, ST. PETERSBURG. 



BY RAIL TO MOSCOW. 161 

his orderly were locked in with us. Our trunk was 
checked through to Moscow by the guide, very much 
as we would have done it at home. He gave me the 
check, and I paid him his last pourloire before we 
entered. This was the only daily local train going 
southeastward, and whoever would leave St. Peters- 
burg for the way stations must travel by it. 

Our first impression, after leaving the city, was 
that of the flatness and the vacantness of the land; 
the landscape was marked here and there with in- 
significant timber, birches, firs and wide reaches 
of tangled grasses, and seemed uninhabited. There 
were no sheep, no hogs, no goats. Occasionally 
we saw herds of cattle and some horses, but very 
little tillage anywhere. The few houses, mostly low 
built, were of small-sized logs, or slabs. Towns 
and villages were few and far apart. In the towns 
were rambling wooden buildings, all just alike; in 
the villages were log and wooden cabins, scattered 
along a single wide street, and these streets were deep 
mud and mire from door to door. Here and there 
was a wooden church painted green, with onion-shaped 
steeple gilded or painted white, but there were no 
schoolhouses anywhere. At all the railroad stations 
were many soldiers, and dull-looking, shock-headed 
peasants, men clad in sheepskin overcoats with the 
wool inside, and women in short skirts wearing men's 
boots, or with their legs wrapped in dirty cotton cloth 
tied on with strings, their feet bound up in twisted 

straw. It was a desolate, monotonous, dreary, sombre 

11 



162 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

land. We saw no smiling faces anywhere, but al- 
ways were the corners of the mouth drawn down. Now 
and then we passed a large town, with a commodious, 
well-built station of brick and stone. Here and there 
we saw huge factories and mills, all belonging to the 
government of the Czar. 

We stopped at Lubin for supper. The guard 
unlocked our car, opened the door and pointed to the 
station, where we found a monster eatingroom with 
huge lunch counters on either side and long rows of 
tables down the middle. Everybody was standing 
up; there were no seats anywhere. Hot soft drinks 
were served at the side counters and smoking coffee 
and tall glasses of hot, clear tea. The Russian swal- 
lows only hot drinks and eats only hot foods. On the 
center tables, set above spirit lamps, were hot dishes 
with big metal covers. There were glasses of hot drink 
for a few Jcopeeks, which the Russian pours down 
all at once. Taking a plate from a pile standing 
ready, you help yourself to what victuals you 
choose. There were hot doughnuts with hashed meat 
inside, hot apple dumplings, hot juicy steaks, hot 
stews, hot fish; all H-O-T. When you have eaten 
your fill, you pay your bill at a counter near the en- 
trance, according to your own reckoning. The 
Russian is honest in little things, and nobody doubts 
your word or questions the correctness of your pay- 
ment. The eatingroom was full of big, tall, robust, 
fair-haired, blue-eyed men and a few women. The 
Russian is big himself, he likes big things, he thinks 



UNDER MILITARY GUARD. 163 

on big lines, he sees with wide vision, too wide almost to 
be practical. Hanging around the station were groups 
of unkempt, dirty peasants. We see such groups of 
gaping peasants at every station, always a hopeless look 
of "don't care" in their eyes. 

The train ran smoothly and we slept well. All 
Russian cars are set on trucks, American fashion, and 
there is no jarring and bouncing as in England's 
truckless carriages. We traveled over an almost 
straight roadway, traversing the Valdai hills, the 
brooks and rivulets of which, uniting, give rise to 
the mighty Volga, and crossing the river passed 
through the city of Tver during the night. It was just 
daylight when I awoke. I at once arose, and then 
waked Mr. C and afterward we aroused the ladies. A 
different military officer and a different orderly were 
now traveling in our car. The officer seemed to have 
kept vigil in the compartment ahead of our own. 
When I came out of the stateroom, he was standing 
smoking a cigarette in the aisle just outside our door. 
When I went to the toilet-room he followed me and 
then returned to the door of our stateroom. He 
watched us all, even standing guard at the door of the 
toilet-room when occupied by the ladies. We were 
evidently in his charge. Later, I made acquaintance 
with him, accosting him in German, to which he 
readily replied. He was a medium-sized, wiry man 
with dark hair and eyes, close-cropped beard and 
long moustaches. He was a ''lieutenant-colonel of 
infantry," he said. 



164 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

The night before, as we rode along, we noticed many 
soldiers gathered everywhere at the stations. Now 
there were none, but instead there was a soldier pacing 
up and down each side of the track, a soldier every 
sixteen seconds! His gun was on his shoulder. He 
wore a long brown overcoat reaching to his heels, and 
a vizored brown cap. At all the bridges there were sev- 
eral soldiers, at each culvert two. After a few miles 
of soldiers, I commented on this, to me, extraordinary 
spectacle, and asked the colonel what it meant. "Do 
you not know," he said, "the Czar is coming in half an 
hour? He is returning from the autumn manoeu- 
vers in the south ! ' ' Presently, we drew in on a siding. 
I wanted to go out with my kodak and take a snapshot. 
He said, "Es ist verhoten (It is forbidden). You 
cannot go out. ' ' He then asked to see my kodak, which 
he examined with the greatest care, taking it quite 
apart. He then handed it back to me saying, apolo- 
getically, "Bombs have been carried in kodak cases, 
you know." Soon we heard the roar of an approach- 
ing train. The ladies pressed to the windows. The uni- 
formed attendant stepped up and pulled down the 
shades right in their faces. I demurred to this and ap- 
pealed to the colonel, who then directed the guard to 
raise the curtains, seeming to censure him in Russian. 
The ladies might look. A train of dark purple cars 
richly gilded flashed by. Was it the Czar? No ! Only 
the Court. Another train just like the first would fol- 
low in half an hour and the Czar would be on that. 
But none of the public might know on which train he 




THE HOLY SAVIOR GATE. KREMLIN. 




OUR MILITARY GUARD BARGAINING FOR APPLES. 



UNDER , MILITARY GUARD. 165 

would ride. The colonel turned to me and said, ' ' You 
kill Presidents in America. We would protect our 
Czars here ! We also have Anarchists. ' ' 

I could not forbear remarking upon the excessive 
number of men in uniforms, soldiers apparently, I 
met everywhere in Russia, as well as the great expanse 
of vacant land, saying to him, **You have too many 
soldiers in Russia. You should have fewer men in the 
army and more men out on the land tilling the soil and 
supporting themselves. It is unfair to those who work 
to be compelled to feed so many idle mouths. ' ' He an- 
swered me frankly. He said, " It is necessary to have 
these soldiers. The peasants are ignorant. We take 
their young men and make soldiers and good citizens 
out of them. The army is a school of instruction ; it is 
there the peasant learns to be loyal and to shoot." 
And then he said with emphasis, * * Ah ! In America 
you don 't need to learn to shoot, you are like the Boers, 
you all know how to shoot, ' ' which view of American 
dexterity, I, of course, readily acceded to. And when 
I asked him why it was there were no schools or school- 
houses in all this journey, he replied that it was useless 
to build schools for the peasant, for he did not wish to 
learn. He had no desire to improve. ' * You in Amer- 
ica, ' ' he said, ' ' are every year receiving the energetic 
young men of all Europe. You are constantly recruit- 
ing with the vigor and energy of the world. You can 
afford to have schools. Your people want schools, but 
the Russian people want no schools. They will not 
learn, they will not change, and no young men ever 



166 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

come to Russia. We receive no help from the outside. 
Nobody comes here. Nobody. Nobody (Niemand, 
Niemand). We have always tiie peasant, always 
the peasant (Immer der Bauer). And then he 
asked me about President Roosevelt," and inquired 
whether he would succeed himself for a second term, 
remarking that "Mr. Roosevelt was greatly admired 
by the Russian army." "The Russian army sees in 
your President Roosevelt a great man," he said, then 
added, "in France the Jews and financiers set up 
a President, but in America you choose a man who is 
a man." We became very good friends, and he ac- 
cepted from me an American cigar, one of a few I 
had brought along and saved for an emergency. At 
subsequent stations he allowed me to get out in his 
company, and even let me take his picture along 
with some of the other officers who stood about. 
The Czar had passed. The weight of responsibility 
was off his shoulders, he had discovered no evidence 
of our being conspirators. He now treated us as 
friends. He even directed the car attendant to clean 
from the windows their accumulated dust. 

During all the early hours of the morning we came 
through the same flat, desolate, uninhabited country. 
It was a landscape of profound monotony, with the 
dark green of the firs, the frosted yellow of the 
birches, the withering browns of the tangled grasses, 
the black and sodden soil. Even the crows were 
dressed in melancholy gray. 



XIX. 

Out Af rival at Moscow — Splendor and Squalor — 

Enlightenment and Superstition — Russia 

Asiatic Rather Than European* 

Moscow, Russia, September 20, 1902. 

It was toward ten o'clock when we drew near the 
suburbs of Moscow, a city of more than a million in- 
habitants. We saw straggling wooden houses, mostly 
unpainted, rarely ever more than one story high, 
and unpaved streets filled with country wagons, not 
the great two-wheeled carts of France, but long, low, 
four-wheeled wagons with horses pulling singly, or 
hitched three and four abreast; and I noted that the 
thills and traces of these wagons were fastened to the 
projecting axles of the fore wheels, the pull being 
thus directly on the axle, so as to lift the wheel out 
of the ever present mud holes. So universal has be- 
come this method of hitching up a wagon that I ob- 
served it even used on the vehicles in the cities where 
the streets are paved. Men in high boots and sheep- 
skin coats and felt caps were walking beside the 
wagons, cracking long whips. The roads appeared to 
be frightful sloughs of bottomless mire. 

Our train drew into a long, low, brick station, the 
Nicholas Depot. The door of the car was unlocked, 

(167) 



168 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

porters came in and seized our bags, and we followed 
them. Our military escort did not even deign to say 
good-bye. He was writing up his note book and 
seemingly preoccupied. The instant we emerged 
from the station portal we were surrounded by a mob 
of roaring izvostcJiiks; a pandemonium. We picked 
out two of the cleaner-looking droschkies; the porters 
who had taken our checks came with the trunks 
on their shoulders, and we started off for our hotel. 
Although a dozen izvostchiks will wrangle and war 
for your custom, until you fear for your very life, 
yet the instant you pick your man, the others retire 
and peace reigns. There is no attempt to make you 
change your mind. 

The sky was overcast, drops of rain were falling, 
and there had been more rain earlier in the day. The 
cobble-paved streets were thickly overlaid with mud. 
Surely, they had never been cleaned in a century! 
Moscow is a city of low, one and two story buildings, 
generally of stone or stucco, but there are many of 
wood. It is a city full of reek and accumulated filth, 
and is apparently vsdthout sewers, or with sewers badly 
laid and long ago choked up. It is a city of narrow 
streets with many turns, and narrow sidewalks or 
none at all. It is an old city, the ways and alleys 
and streets of which have grown up as they would. 
The people we met were ill-clad, ur^washed, unkempt, 
wild-eyed, shock-polled, dull-faced. They were a 
meaner multitude of men and women than I had ever 
before set eyes upon. 



MOSCOW. 169- 

"Hotel Berlin," we said to our izvostchiks. The 
word "Berlin" they seemed to comprehend, and they 
brought us safely to our destination. It is a comfort- 
able inn, on the Rojdestvensky way, kept by a Jew, 
and recommended to us by the Swiss Concierge of 
the St. Petersburg hotel. "It is the hotel where the 
drummers go," he said. We had learned long ago 
that "where the drummers go," is where the best 
table will be found, for the world over, the drummer 
loves a knowing cook. So we went to the Hotel 
Berlin. We were there received by a little weazen- 
faced, black-eyed, dried-up man, who spoke in voluble 
German and broken English. "The police had 
notified him that we would come ! " he said. He told 
us that "He had once lived in London!" — and de- 
clared that his rooms were exactly what we wanted, 
and his table "the best in Moscow." He also con- 
fided to us that he was "fortunate in having at hand, 
immediately at hand, and now at our service, the 
most skilled and intelligent guide in Moscow, who 
would be delighted to serve us, who was altogether 
at our disposal and whose charge would be "only ten 
ruUes a day," and the guide "talked English." We 
thanked our host, took the rooms and accepted the 
guide. We have now been in Moscow several days, 
and the guide has been faithful. He vows he has 
been twice in Chicago. He says he is from Hungary 
and he talks excellent German, but Mr. C, who 
himself hails from Chicago, is quite unable to com- 
prehend the English of his speech. Only my knowl- 



170 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

edge of German has saved the guide his rubles. More- 
over, his remembrance of Chicago is indistinct, as 
well as of New York. Indeed, his knowledge of 
America we are fain to believe is altogether hearsay. 
The nighest he has been to Chicago, we surmise, was 
when a few years ago he "bought Astrakhan lamb 
skins at Nijni Novo Gorod for Marshall Field & Com- 
pany," whose agent we believe he may really then 
have been. He is now married to a Russian, and it 
is many years since he has been back to Hungary, 
nor does he have much occasion to talk German or 
English, except when he is acting a^ guide to Ameri- 
cans. Mr. C now and then forgets and attempts 
to use American speech in conversation with him, 
when there is entanglement. I am appealed to 
in German, the diiSculty is cleared up, and so 
we get on. 

To-day, we have taken a landau and have driven 
all about the city. Just how shall I describe this 
strange commingling of past and present ; of sumptu- 
ous splendor and squalor profounder than any seen 
in St. Petersburg; of modern intelligence and medi- 
aeval superstition; this city which contains a Gos- 
tinnoi Dvor, a magnificent building of white stone, 
extending over many blocks, a bazaar of six thou- 
sand shops, with a single steel and glass vaulted roof 
covering the entire immense series of structures as 
well as all included streets; this city of beautiful 
stores, displaying the costliest products of London, of 
Paris and New York ; which is lit with electric lights 




BEGGING PILGRIMS, ST. BASIL. 




THE RED SGUARE. MOSCOW. 



MOSCOW — THE EIKON. 171 

equal to Berlin, and provided with a telephone service 
superior to that of London; this city where right 
alongside this modern bazaar, the handiwork of 
Chicago builders, stand the towers and ramparts of 
the ancient Kremlin; a city where at every corner 
of every street, swarm bowing multitudes worshiping 
before the innumerable E ikons. 

A strange and curious sight it is to see a street 
packed with people all bowing to a little picture 
stuck up in the wall. The Eikon to the Russian is even 
more important than the Czar. He wears a miniature 
Eikon hung about his neck as a sort of amulet. He 
puts an Eikon in his house, in his shop, along his 
streets, and builds cathedrals and lavishes fortunes 
to house and adorn them. Indeed, Russia might be 
fitly termed the land of the Eikon, for there, as no- 
where else in all the world, has a simple picture been 
exalted to become an object of worship. The Greek 
church allows no images. One of the serious causes of 
the great«schism with Rome in the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries was the strict interpretation by the Eastern 
Church of the injunction of the II Commandment, 
* ' Thou shalt make no graven images, ' ' wherefore they 
declared the Roman practice rank idolatry, bat to the 
sacred pictures they gave their sanction. These 
Eikons are mostly painted in the monasteries by 
monks of recognized holy lives. They are paintings 
of the Christ, or of a Saint, sometimes the Virgin 
Mary and the Christ Child together, and are often 
so overlaid with gold and jewels — tens of thousands 



172 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

of dollars worth of jewels — that only the eyes and 
the face may be seen, the draperies of the person be- 
ing scrupulously imitated and concealed by the over- 
laid plates of gold. 

This afternoon we saw a big, black, hearse-like car- 
riage drawn by six black horses, harnessed three 
abreast, accompanied by priests, to which all the 
people took off their hats and bowed and crossed 
themselves as it passed along. It was an Eikon being 
carried to the death-bed of some penitent, who would 
be permitted to kiss it before death. Sometimes these 
Eikons work miracles and the dying sinner begins to 
recover so soon as it enters the room. All Russians 
keep Eikons in their homes, and generally have one 
in every room, before which a little candle is kept 
perpetually burning. And when a Eussian enters a 
house, he at once goes to the family Eikon and bows 
and crosses himself before he greets his host. To 
ignore the Eikon would be an unpardonable offense. 
In St. Petersburg we procured a copy of the famous 
Eikon which reposes in the little chapel of the house 
of Peter the Great, the portrait of St. Alexander 
Nevsky, which Peter always carried with him into 
battle, and to the power of which he attributed the 
victory of Pultova. The beautiful cathedral dedi- 
cated to "Our Lady of Kazan," upon the Nevsky 
Prospekt, in St. Petersburg, was erected in honor of 
victories brought to Russian arms by the miraculous 
influence of her Eikon. The Russian lives in an 
atmosphere of Eikons, and it takes a quick eye and 




f^mi^Mi 



CATHEDRAL OF ST. BASIL THE BLESSED, MOSCOW. 



ENLIGHTENMENT AND SUPERSTITION. 173 

an agile hand to doff your hat and properly bow, as 
the Russian always does, whenever you pass by one. 

In this city of contrasts, in sight of the modern 
Gostinnoi Dvor, I must take off my hat in going 
through a "Holy Gate," and every man, woman and 
child I here meet are crossing themselves and bowing 
as they pass along! In Mexico you do not feel so 
surprised at the superstition of the Indian! But 
these are white men with blue eyes and yellow hair! 
This is a city which contains so splendid an edifice 
as the monster cathedral of Saint Savior, a pile of 
wonderful beauty, built of white granite, and domed 
with five gigantic onion-shaped, cross-topped cupolas, 
all sheathed in plates of solid gold ; it is a city which 
contains four hundred and fifty churches, five hun- 
dred chapels, and convents and monasteries, how 
many I dare not say, all of them begolded and be- 
jeweled inside and out with barbaric emblazonry. 
And yet it is a city, the streets of which are as ill- 
paved and as stinking as were London's five hun- 
dred years ago ; a city where trade and enterprise are 
throttled by arbitrary and excessive taxation, while 
the common people have no schools, even as they have 
no votes. 

We had just left the Imperial palace of the Krem- 
lin, the most gorgeous edifice my eyes have ever looked 
upon, where I had beheld such chambers of gold and 
precious jewels and priceless tapestry, as one only 
reads about in the Tales of the Arabian Nights ; where 
the vast Hall of St. George in the Czar's new palace ia 



174 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

plated with gold from floor to ceiling, and the ceiling 
is altogether of gold; where is gold along the walls, 
panels of alabaster showing in between, ivory finish 
and gold, gold and lapis lazuli, gold and emerald 
malachite, gold in leaf, gold in heavy plate — gold 
everywhere. "We were but the moment come out from 
this stupendous display of riches. We had just 
passed through the Holy Savior Gate. Our senses 
were still dazzled with this excess of reckless magnifi- 
cence, when we found ourselves upon the Red 
Square — "Red" because of the human blood spilled 
there in the countless massacres of Moscow's citizens 
by past Czars, — amidst the swarming throngs of the 
abjectly poor; men and women, pinehed-faced and 
hollow-eyed; men and women who toil with patient, 
dull, dumb hopelessness, and who are thankful to 
eat black bread through all their lives, who are be- 
come mere human brutes! We saw many groups of 
these, gnawing chunks of the black bread for their 
dinner with all the zest of famished wolves, while 
they bowed and crossed themselves incessantly, thank- 
ing God that they were indeed alive ! 

The wanton luxury of the rich, the pinching pov- 
erty of the poor, so widespread, so universal in Russia, 
appal and shock me upon every hand. What are the 
political and social conditions which let these things 
be possible is the query which constantly hammers on 
my brain! Until to-day, I have never understood the 
light and shadow of Roman history, nor what manner 
of men made up the hosts and hordes of Alarie and 



THE KREMLIN. 175 

of Attila. Here, you see the whole story right upon 
these streets. 

We have not only visited the Kremlin, its cathe- 
drals and its palaces, its museums and its buildings 
of note, but we have also stood before and gazed upon 
that wonder of all churches, the cathedral of St. 
Basil, the weird and gorgeous creation of Vassili 
Blagenoi, and lasting monument to the artistic sense 
of that monster-tyrant, Ivan the IV, called the ' ' Ter- 
rible." 

In the cathedral of the Archangel Michael, within 
the sacred precincts of the Kremlin, lie now their 
coffins side by side, costly coverings of gold-be- 
spangled velvet enshrouding each; a strange ex- 
ample of the equality of death. The story runs: 
so delighted was Ivan with the extraordinary 
and curious beauty of Vassili 's creation, that he gave 
a sumptuous banquet in his honor within the Imperial 
palace and there, lavishly bepraising him before the 
assembled company, declared that it were impossible 
for human mind to create another building so wonder- 
ful in all the world. Whereupon turning to Vassili, 
he inquired of the flattered and delighted architect 
whether this declaration were not the truth. The 
gratified creator of the wonderful cathedral is said 
to have replied, **Ah, Sire, give me the money and 
I will build you another a thousand times more beauti- 
ful than the poor work I have already done.'* Hear- 
ing this, the Terrible Ivan turned to his headsman 
who stood ever handy at his elbow, and ordered Vas- 



176 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

sili's eyes to be immediately burnt out with red-hot 
irons, in order, as he declared, that there should never 
be again created so splendid an edifice; then, Vas- 
sili dying as a resiilt of the operation, Ivan ordered a 
magnificent funeral and directed that the body be 
laid within the consecrated chamber of the cathedral, 
among the princes of the blood, where even to-day it 
yet remains. 

Our Hungarian guide vowed that this tale was the 
literal truth, pointing to the coffin which lay at our 
feet, among the relics of the house of Rurik, as evi- 
dence incontrovertible. Nor did we presume to doubt 
this instance of Ivan's cruelty, so thick spotted are 
the pages of history with a thousand other instances 
of his devilish acts. 

Ivan loved the sight and smell of blood. As a boy 
he delighted to torture domestic animals, and to ride 
down old women when he caught them on the streets. 
As a man, he had the Archbishop of Novogorod sewn 
up in the skins of wild beasts and thrown to savage 
dogs; frequently he dispatched his enemies with his 
own sword, and he publicly murdered his eldest son, 
the Czarevitch. No malevolent scheme of the human 
mind was too cruel for his enjoyment. By him entire 
cities were devoted to destruction on the most trifling 
pretext. For one instance, the inhabitants of tiie com- 
mercial towns of Novogorod (sixty thousand in Novo- 
gorod alone) and of Tver and of Klin were massacred 
in cold blood under his personal supervision. He 
was more cruel than Nero or Caligula, and compared 





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ATROCITIES OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE. 177 

with the appalling atrocities of his reign, Louis XI 
and Ferdinand VII were gentle kings. 

His presumption was equal to his cruelty, and he did 
not hesitate to send his Ambassador to Queen Eliza- 
beth to offer her the privilege of becoming his eighth 
bride. History knows no such other monster as Ivan 
the Terrible, who was undoubtedly mad; and yet he 
built beautiful churches and palaces, and did more 
to encourage art and culture within the confines of 
the empire than any other of the Russian Czars. 

"We have also driven about the city and viewed the 
public buildings, the shops and the markets, and this 
afternoon have come out across the river Moskva, 
and climbed the hills of Vorobievy Gory, the 
"Sparrow Hills," — from the heights of which Na- 
poleon, on that memorable fourteenth day of Sep- 
tember, 1812, fresh from the victory of Borodino, 
first viewed the city. In superb panorama, Holy 
Moscow lay stretched before us, its towers, its spires, 
its red and green and blue and yellow walls and roofs, 
its golden domes, presenting a most sumptuous har- 
mony of color to the delighted eye. 

While St. Petersburg is the political capital, yet 
Moscow is the real center of Russia. Here is the focus 
of Russia's industrial, commercial, financial and re- 
ligious life. Her ** Chinese Bank" cashes notes on 
Kashgar and Pekin, and sells bills of exchange upon 
their banks in return. The street-life of this most 
Russian city, the coming and going of its people, the 
commingling of these divers tribes and races, strik- 

12 



178 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

ingly illustrates the heterogeneous character of the 
cumbrous empire. Here pass me by the blue-eyed, 
tow-polled mujiks from the provinces; here I meet, 
face to face, the swarthy skins which tell of Tiflis and 
of Teheran; here I touch elbows with kaftan-gowned 
traders from Merv and Samarkand, and silk-clad 
Chinese merchants from the distant East. 

As I stroll along the Nickols-Skaia, the Iliinka- 
Skaia, or the Eojdestvensky Boulevard, and catch the 
glances of these faces which stare upon me with con- 
stant grave suspicion, doubtful, perchance, whether 
I am a foreign spy in bureaucratic employ, or a 
stranger friendly to the held-down people, I am mus- 
ing upon the curious interweaving of science and 
superstition, of modem and mediaeval custom, which 
I here behold, and I ponder how work the hearts and 
minds behind these masks which alone I see. Pro- 
found suspicion and discontent is the impression I 
receive. Nowhere do I note a single instance of that 
joyous hopefulness which marks men's faces in Amer- 
ica. The eye which here looks into mine has about 
it a gaze not frank and sunny, but furtive and melan- 
choly as that of a chained-up wolf. Gradually I am 
beginning to comprehend that the men I look upon, 
although clothed in the veneer of twentieth century 
civilization, are nevertheless in mind and heart bar- 
barians, — ^barbarians chafing beneath the bitter burden 
of the hateful auto-bureaucratic rule; they are Asi- 
atic rather than European; even in discontent they 
lack the open-mindedness of the West ; th^y belong to 



ASIATIC RATHER THAN EUROPEAN. 179 

the mysterious and inscrutable peoples of the East. 
Napoleon's saying, ** Scratch a Russian and you will 
find a Tartar," now comes to me with redoubled force. 
Despite the French telephones and the Chicago- 
built Bazaar, despite the splendid churches and the 
gorgeous Kremlin, I perceive that these Russians are 
yet the same as when Byzantium sent St. Cyril and 
his monks to Christianize their savage ancestors thir- 
teen centuries ago. 



XX. 

The Splendid Pageant of the Russian Mass — The 

Separateness of Russian Religious Feeling 

From Modern Thought — Russia 

Mediaeval and Pagan. 

Moscow, Russia, September 21, 1903. 

We have just been leaning over a guard rail of 
burnished brass, peering down into the half twilight 
gloom, beholding ten thousand Russian men and wo- 
men bending their swaying bodies, as a wheat field 
bends before the wind, crossing themselves in feverish 
fervor, even bowing the forehead to the marble floor 
and kissing it rapturously in the solemn celebration 
of the mass. 

We drove in a landau, — all four of us and our 
Hungarian guide, — through the narrow, crowded 
streets. "Drove," I say! Rather I should say 
whirled, behind two mighty black Arab stallions, 
which no man might hold, but only guide, and we 
never slackened our pace until we dashed up to the 
great white granite stairway of the vast cathedral of 
Saint Savior. Our Russian driver yelled, men and 
vehicles fled from our path, and yet we ran over 
no one, we killed no one ! Our furious horses stopped 
short on their haunches. Two Russian soldiers now 

(180) 




CATHEDRAL OF ST. SAVIOR, MOSCOW. 



PAGEANT OF THE RUSSIAN MASS. 181 

held them by their heads. We drove like nobles. We 
must be grandees! 

The cathedral of Saint Savior has been nearly 
a century in building. Founded in commemoration 
of the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, it has been slowly 
raised by means of the multitudinous contributions of 
the Russian people. It is a square cross in outline, 
as lofty as the capitol at Washington, and sur- 
mounted by five oriental domes, the central one bigger 
than the other four, all topped with Greek crosses, 
and all covered with plates of solid gold, the 
burnished glittering splendor of which dazzle the 
eyes long miles away. Within, the interior is tiled 
with rare marbles of divers colors, while the walls 
are decorated with priceless paintings by the most 
illustrious Russian artists of the century, done by 
them at the command of the Czar, with pillars of 
malachite and lapis lazuli, green and blue, standing 
between the splendid pictures. There are altars of 
solid silver covered with rare embroideries of gold 
and emblazoned with precious stones. Close by each 
altar rests an Eikon. 

A soldier in gold lace uniform opened our carriage 
door. He led us up the long flight of white steps — 
white in the golden sunlight — and pushed his way 
and ours through the bowing, crossing, sweating, 
stinking (the Russian really never takes a bath) 
thousands, who, like ourselves, sought to enter the 
precincts of the most magnificent cathedral of 
"Holy Russia." We jostled against rich merchants 



182 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

and their wives clad in splendid furs and silks and 
adorned with many jewels ; against military officers 
in long gray coats, high boots and caps of astrakhan 
wool or fur; and peasants, in sheepskin coats, belted 
at the waist, their legs wrapped in cotton cloth tied 
with leathern thongs, their feet bound up in straw. , 
These farmers from the country are too poor to afford 
the luxury of socks and shoes. Through all these the 
soldier with our pourboire in his hand, forced his 
way — ^not always gently — and led us up a winding 
flight of one hundred steps to the series of galleries 
which run round the immense interior. Here he again 
forced back the press of people until we might lean 
over the great brass rail and gaze down below ! And 
what a spectacle ! There, were ten thousand, twenty 
thousand, — I dare not say how many, men and wo- 
men; all standing; all bowing; all devoutly respond- 
ing to the intoning of the priests! Three hundred 
m.en and boys clad in red and purple and golden vest- 
ments were chanting the melancholy music of the 
Bussian Church ! No organ is there allowed, no musi- 
cal instrument, no instrument save that which God 
has made, the human throat! Then, from the Holy 
of Holies, the innermost sanctuary, comes out the 
Archbishop of all the E-ussias, the Metropolitan 
of **Holy Moscow," clad in vestments of gold and of 
silver, intoning the mystery of the mass! Other 
priests stand close behind him, swinging censers of 
incense, and also chanting in melancholy mournful 
harmony with the mighty melody of the choir. Never 



RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS FEELING. 183 

have my senses apprehended such opulent, refulgent 
splendor, such a pageant of gold and of purple, of 
jewels and of fine linen, such clouds of incense, such 
glorious, mighty music from the human throat ! Such 
fervor, such frenzy, such exaltation as I now beheld 
in the swaying, worshiping multitude! I was be- 
holding the fervant, fanatical, hysterical religious feel- 
ing of the Russian people, a people mediaeval in their 
blind superstition, mediaeval in their per-f ervid ardor 
for their church ! 

What I am writing of can only be impressions, and 
yet perhaps the impressions which I receive in my 
brief sojourn within the Russian Empire may more 
vividly portray that subtle, almost indefinable, at- 
mosphere which broods over Russia and marks it 
from all the world, than I might be able to do if I 
remained so long within her confines that I should 
lose the power. 

I have now sojourned in Russia barely seven days, 
yet I feel as though I had spent a lifetime in another 
world than that of Amrica. I hear no sound which is 
familiar. I cannot even count in Russian. I see no 
street signs which my eyes have before beheld ; even 
the alphabet, though Greek, is yet enigmatically 
Russianized. Nor do I find that English or Danish, 
French or German is of much avail. In the largest 
news emporium or bookstore, in St. Petersburg, upon 
the Nevsky Prospekt, the other day, where twenty 
or thirty clerks were serving the public, there was 
no one of them who spoke or even understood either 



184 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

French or German, much less English. In the chief 
bookstore in Moscow, where a large trade is carried 
on, nothing is spoken but Russian. After much search 
I did find one small bookshop where a clerk spoke 
passable French, and another where the Jewish pro- 
prietor understood German. And while it is true 
that the high Russian officer who escorted us from 
St. Petersburg spoke fluently in German and in 
French, and while it may also be true that among the 
bureaucracy, and perhaps nobility, French is still gen- 
erally understood, yet it is equally true that the present 
tendency in Russia is to Russify language as well as 
things, and that foreign tongues are less spoken and 
less known to-day than they were thirty or forty years 
ago. The Russian is absorbed in himself, he knows 
little of the outside world and he cares less. The 
news of Europe and of America and of all the earth 
only comes to him in expurgated driblets through the 
sieve of the Censor. The saying that "there are three 
continents," the "continent of Europe," the "conti- 
nent of Russia" and the "continent of Asia," is no 
mere jest. One feels it here to be a verity. One feels 
that Russia, despite her pretensions to the contrary, 
is mediaeval, that she is mentally and morally aloof 
from all the progress of the present century, from all 
the thought of modern peoples, and utterly remote 
from all touch with the progressive nations of to-day. 
In Scandinavia, the world is abreast of the times, its 
peoples are advanced and alert, but the instant you 



RUSSIA MEDIAEVAL AND PAGAN. 185 

cross the dead-line and enter Russia, you feel that the 
world has taken a back-set of five hundred years, that 
Brussian life is so far behind all modem movement 
that it never can catch up. 

Even the bigness of St. Petersburg carries with it 
an impracticability that is itself mediaeval. St. 
Petersburg did not grow up because there was need 
of a city on that spot. It was created as the deliberate 
act of a despot. Peter the Great feared to live longer 
in Moscow, He had murdered and tortured too many 
of its worthy citizens. He had, for one job, hung eight 
thousand patriots in the Red Square; he had thrown 
ten thousand more into dungeons, there to rot. Daring 
no longer to live in Moscow, he founded the new capi- 
tal, "Petersburg," on the banks of the Neva, which 
should become a seaport, be protected from his own 
subjects by the ships he himself would build, and 
house his government as safe from domestic as from 
foreign foes. He laid out the city with streets so 
wide that it has never been possible to pave them 
well. He provided public buildings so huge that it 
has never been possible to secure a foundation upon 
the Neva's miry delta solid enough safely to hold 
them up. He drove the nobility into this quagmire 
city, and drew the bureaucracy up to its unstable 
ground. To-day, St. Petersburg is a city of a million 
and a half of inhabitants, but if the Russian Czars 
should choose to reconstitute Moscow their permanent 
capital, St. Petersburg would again become a wilder- 



186 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

ness, a waste of marshy islands, desolate and bare. 
It is the hot-house plant of autocracy. There is no 
natural reason for it to exist. 

Everywhere in Russia one feels the certain so 
childish straining after effect which is mediaeval and 
barbaric. In the palace of the Kremlin lies the dis- 
abled and gigantic cannon which Catherine II com- 
manded to be cast, and which has never fired a shot 
for the reason that it was so big they could never 
find a gunner to serve and handle it. Close beside 
it lies the enormous bell, the "Czar Kolokol" — King 
of Bells — cast by command of a Czar, so huge that it 
could never be lifted up into a belfry and which, fall- 
ing to the ground from a temporary scaffold, cracked 
itself by sheer weight. It lies there a fit commentary 
on overleaping ambition. The cars and locomotives 
of the railways are uncouth from their very size. 
Russia is like a big, loose-jointed, over-grown boy, a 
I)oy so constituted that he may never become a veri- 
table man. 

The government arsenals and machine shops in 
Moscow are run by German and English bosses. The 
Russian makes big plans, but he does not possess the 
power himself to carry them to successful issue. The 
great empire is so spread out that pieces of it are 
even now ready to break off. An intelligent Swede 
with whom I voyaged from Stockholm, then living 
in St. Petersburg, declared the day not far distant 
when not only Finland, but the German provinces of 



MUJIKS' HATRED OF BUREAUCRATS. 187 

Esthonia and Livonia and Courland along the Baltic, 
as well as Poland, must inevitably crack off. And he 
declared that from mere internal cumbersomeness the 
Russian Empire must soon dissolve. It may be so. 
And one is here impressed with the fact that Russia 
now chiefly holds together by reason of the military 
might of her autocracy, whose strength and per- 
manence under serious defeat may vanish in a night. 

Another thing I have become cognizant of is the 
fact that everywhere the men who do not wear a 
uniform hate the men who do. The cleavage parting 
the upper and the lower levels of Russian life is im- 
mense. Apparently there is no sympathy between 
them. The mujik upon the street scowls at the uni- 
formed official who drives by in his dashing equipage. 
He looks with surly countenance upon the grandee 
who nearly runs him down. He hates the men who 
so mercilessly wield authority and power, and who 
order the Cossack to ride him down and knout and 
saber him into terrified submission. 

One morning we passed through a great square in 
Moscow containing nothing but men — wild-eyed, long- 
haired, long-bearded men ; men in rags, most of them, 
and all of them compelled to come there and wait 
to be hired to work. To that square must all work- 
ing men go who seek work. The city feeds them 
while they wait, a single small piece of black bread 
each day. Some never leave that square, but wait 
there their lifetime through. They gazed upon our 



188 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

handsome landau with hungry and wolfish eyes. 
How glad would they have been to tear us into pieces 
and divide what little spoil they might obtain! I 
never before beheld so frightful, unkempt a com- 
pany of hopeless, hapless, hungry human slaves as 
these Russian workingmen who waited for a job. 




A MOSCOW TRAM CAR. 



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THE OUT-OF-WORKS. 



XXL 

The First Snows — Moscow to "Warsaw — Fat Farm 
Lands and Frightful Poverty of the Mwjifcs 
Who Own them and Till them — I Re- 
cover My Passport. 

Hotel Savoy, Friedrichs Strasse, 
Berlin, Germany, September 23, 1902. 
"Hock der Kaiser, Hoch der Kaiser! Gott sei 
Dank! Ich bin in Deutschland angekommen!" have 
my brain and blood and bones been crying out all the 
last fifty miles, since we safely crossed the Russian 
border. Until the moment when the last Russian 
official waked me up, held a light in my face, and, 
staring at me, compared my visage with what the 
passport said it ought to be, and handed me back that 
document to be mine forever, to be framed and hung 
up in my Kanawha home, and preserved for my chil- 
dren and children's children as evidence that I came 
safe out of Russia; not till that midnight hour did 
I realize that I belonged to the common Teutonic 
brotherhood of men, and that Puritan-descended 
American though I were, I and my German neighbor 
were yet really kin! But at that moment when we 
crossed the German boundary, I knew it and felt it 

(189) 



190 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

in every fibre and tingling nerve. I was a Teuton, 
I was a German, I was come again among my blood 
kindred. "Hoch der Kaiser/' "Selig set Deutsch- 
land!" I had come out of mediaevalism, from the 
shadows of barbarism, I was emerged into the light 
of the twentieth century's sun! 

"We left Moscow late Sunday aiternoon, in a 
blinding snow storm, the first of the year. 

In the morning, after attending mass in the cathe- 
dral of Saint Savior, we drove about the city enjoy- 
ing the cloudless blue sky, the pellucid sunshine. We 
visited the Gentile and Jewish markets, and watched 
the pressing concourse of eager traders bartering and 
chaffering their goods and wares; we passed along 
the high frowning walls of the debtors' prison, where 
any man who has incurred a debt of five hundred 
rubles ($250) may be incarcerated by the creditor, 
and kept shut up as long as the said creditor puts up 
for him the very modest sum of about four cents a 
day for bread. When the creditor quits paying for 
his debtor's keep, the debtor comes out, but not till 
then. The fare at that price is not luxurious, and 
after a few weeks or months of the meagre diet, the 
debtor joyfully promises anything to escape and, 
sometimes, persuades his family or friends to com- 
pound with the creditor and get him out. But some 
there are who spend a lifetime within those walls. 
And our Orthodox driver declared that a Jew liked 
nothing better than to thrust and hold a hapless 
Gentile debtor behind those gates. 




HOLY BEGGAR, NOVO DIEVITCHY. 



THE FIRST SNOWS. 191 

The day was lovely and the air had almost the 
balminess of spring. Men and women and children 
were going about in summer garments, no overcoats 
or wraps, and it might as well have been May or 
June. At the same time, we noticed that the windows 
of our rooms in the hotel were double-sashed and tight- 
corked with cotton, and I also observed that similar 
double windows were fast set on public buildings and 
dwelling-houses past which we drove. But otherwise, 
as we looked into the soft blue sky there was no 
hint of approaching frosts. 

It was near noon when we drove out to see the 
famous convent of Novo Dievitchy, and we spent a 
delightful hour in viewing its towered church, its 
cloisters, its nuns' cells and children's quarters, and 
the curious cemetery where are entombed many of 
Moscow's most illustrious dead, tombs which are set 
above the ground amidst choice shrubbery and bloom- 
ing plants. We had just come out, through the old 
arched gateway, and had encountered a band of holy 
beggars who absorbed our attention and our kop- 
eeks. I had put the ladies into the landau, while 
the driver with great difficulty held back his restive, 
squealing stallions. My hand was on the carriage 
door, when I felt something soft and cold upon it, 
I looked up and behold ! the air was full of big flakes 
of descending snow. The horizon to the north and 
east was black, the blue sky had grown a leaden gray. 
Winter had come to Moscow and to us as silently and 
as suddenly as it once came to Napoleon and his thin- 



192 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

clad army, near a century ago. There was no wind; 
the noises of the city were suddenly hushed; a 
great silence now brooded over Moscow. The air 
was thick with big, fluffy, fluttering particles of white- 
ness which stuck to everything they touched, and 
never melted when they ceased to fall. We could 
not see across the road, even the horses were half hid. 
Our driver gave full rein to the impatient team and we 
flew homeward, but the snow kept coming down just 
the same. It never melted anywhere. It grew 
into piles and mounds and soft feathery masses. It 
wholly concealed the scarred and rutted unevennesses 
of the road, it clung to twig and tree and fence, to 
gable, to window-ledge and lintel. King Winter had 
breakfasted in Archangel and, speeding across flat and 
unbarriered Russia, now dined in Moscow and would 
there permanently remain. And as suddenly all 
Moscow now bloomed forth into sheepskin overcoats 
and elaborate furs and winter wraps. The citizens 
must have had them hanging behind the door upon 
a handy peg, ready for just such a sudden coming of 
the snows. By afternoon, sleighs and sledges jingled 
along the ways and boulevards, and stinking, filthy- 
streeted Moscow was transformed into a city im- 
maculate and pure. And the snow kept ever falling, 
falling, falling, steadily, softly, persistently, without 
let or stop. 

It was toward two o'clock that we took ®ur final 
excursion out beyond the borders of the city to the 
summer palace of the Czars, the favorite Chateau 



THE FIRST SNOWS. 193 

Petrovsky, where prior to the coronation every Czar 
goes to repose and meditate and prepare himself with 
fasting and prayer for the ordeal of the tedious 
ceremonial in the Cathedral of the Assumption within 
the Kremlin. 

The . Chateau is a large and rambling building of 
wood and brick, with extensive suites of big, bare 
rooms. Behind it there lies a garden, laid out 
as though it were in France, with many graveled 
walks, and beds of flowers and edges of close-clipped 
box. Here the Czarina loves to wander, and here she 
passes many a quiet hour when escaped from the 
pomp and pressure of life in the Kremlin's gaudy 
palace. Here one bed of roses was pointed out to us 
as her especial joy. The old French gardener looked 
pathetic as he stood beside it and watched the big 
white flakes alighting upon each leaf and petal. 
"The snows are come," he said, *'the garden dies, 
there will be no flowers more till another year!" 
And then, as if to save his cherished pets, he hastily 
gathered the finest of the blooms and presented them 
to H and begged her to accept and keep them, say- 
ing, ''The snows are come, the Czarina, the Empress, 
will not now object ; to-morrow these will surely all be 
dead." 

In the morning of the day before, we were told 
that, "To-morrow, or next day, or in a week, or a 
fortnight, will come the snows, we do not know how 
soon. But when they come, then we know that winter 
is begun, the long seven months of winter which will 
13 



194 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

not leave us till May or June. It is then you should 
come to see us. Then are these ill-paved and reeking 
streets white and hard and clean; the summer's dusts 
and heats are then forgot, and we quicken with the 
invigoration of the cold; then does the city gladden 
with the gay life of those returned from the summer's 
toil upon the wide estates, or from foreign lands, for 
winter is the season when all Russians best love to 
be at home." 

We settled our hotel bills only after much argu- 
ment with our host. "We would not pay for candles 
we had not burned ; our room was lighted with electric 
lights. We would not pay for steaks we had not 
eaten, nor chickens yet alive, nor for sweets we never 
tasted. No! For these and the like of these we 
flatly refused to pay. *'De Vaiter's meeshtakes, Mein 
Herr, sie shall kom oudt." One hundred rubles for 
three days ! Moscow was as costly as London ! 

Through the falling snows, thick falling snows, 
we drove to the Smolensk railway station, whence 
start the trains going west, for Moscow has not yet 
arrived at the convenience of a union depot. Al- 
though all railroads are owned and run by the gov- 
ernment, yet each train starts from that side of the 
city nearest to the direction it will travel. We en- 
tered a long, low brick and wooden building, and pass- 
ing through a wide dark waiting room, came out upo:p. 
a wooden platform and were beside our train. 
We were ready to go. We had our tickets and our 
passports. Three days before, almost as soon as we 



WE LEAVE MOSCOW. 195 

arrived, we gave the forty-eight hours' notice of our 
intention to leave Russia, and the twenty-four hours' 
notice that we should also leave Moscow. We were per- 
mitted to take our passports to the main ticket office 
up within the city, the Kitai Gorod, and present- 
ing them, secured the tickets. We then returned the 
passports to the police department to be given back 
to us just before we left, by the big uniformed official 
at our hotel. But he did not return them until we 
first bestowed upon him another ten rubles, as 
we had done when leaving St. Petersburg! Now we 
were once more to surrender our passports to a new 
uniformed government official, the train conductor, 
who would also examine them, vise them, and hand 
them to another when we came to Warsaw, to be yet 
again scrutinized and stamped and only returned to 
us when we at last crossed the German border. Nor 
even then until we should be finally inspected and 
compared by yet other officials so as to make dead 
certain that we were indeed the very self same travel- 
ers who now declared they wanted to get out of 
Russia. 

The train was a long one. It was the through ex- 
press carrying the Imperial Mails to Vienna, Berlin 
and Paris. It would pass Smolensk, Minsk, "Brzesc" 
(Brest) and Warsaw. It was one of the important 
trains of the empire. There were many passengers,, 
and we were able to secure only a single stateroom 
with two berths in the first-class car for the ladies, 
while Mr. C and I obtained two berths in the second 



196 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

class car adjoining. We might sit together during 
the day, but for the night we would be in different 
coaches. The berths in our sleeper were provided each 
with a mattress, and an extra ruble gave us a pair 
of blankets, a sheet and a pillow. The cars were 
warm and double-windowed against the cold. 

"We went about twenty miles an hour over a straight- 
tracked road, and our sleep was undisturbed. When 
I awoke in the morning and made my way toward the 
toilet, though early, I yet found a queue of men and 
women ahead of me, and had to fall in line and take 
my turn. A big bearded Jew was just coming out of 
the little toilet room and a slim young woman was 
just going in, a young woman comely and with hair 
tangled and fallen down. This was bad enough, 
but between the tangled hair and myself stood 
another dame with locks quite as disheveled and 
unkempt. But I dared not quit my place, since an 
increasing number of men and women pressed 
uneasily behind me. My only chance was to stick 
it out until those coiffures should be restored to im- 
maculate condition for the day. Within the toilet 
there was no soap, nor towel, nor comb, nor brush, 
nor else but ice-cold water, and a wide open channel 
down into the bitter stinging air. But I had now 
journeyed somewhat in Russia and had come fitly 
prepared. 

All night we had rolled through a dead flat 
country, passing Smolensk, a large city of fifty thou- 
sand inhabitants, and all day we continued to traverse 



FRIGHTFUL POVERTY OF THE MUJIKS. 197 

the same wide levels. The sky was blue, the air was 
cold and keen, there was a slight drifting of snow 
across the illimitable fields. Peasants in belted sheep- 
skin overcoats, which came down to the heels, were 
plowing in the fields, each behind a single horse, and 
women on their knees were planting, or digging out 
potatoes and turnips and beets. Women were also 
hoeing everywhere, working like the men — mostly in 
short skirts, kerchiefs about the head, legs swathed in 
cotton cloth wrapped around and tied on with strings, 
feet like the men 's, wrapped up in plaited straw. The 
houses were miserable wooden huts of only one story 
and with chimneys made of sticks and mud and built 
on the inside to save heat, and meaner than any cabins 
of the most ** ornery" mountaineers of eastern Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee. There were no windows in the 
hovels, no openings but one single door. For the men 
and women who tilled the land, it was poverty, bitter 
poverty everywhere. Yet we were traversing some 
of the finest, richest, most productive farming lands 
of Russia ; lands on which great and abundant crops 
are raised, or ought to be raised, and where these men 
and women ought to be living in ease and comfort 
by their toil, for these lands are largely owned by 
those who till and cultivate them, the "free and 
emancipated" peasantry of Russia! But the great 
crops are of little avail to the helpless peasant. His 
industry brings him no cessation of grinding toil. 
He barely lives, often he starves, sometimes he dies, 
dies of starvation right on this rich, fat land he him- 



198 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

self owns. The government of the Czar knows just 
what each acre of his land will yield, and knowing 
this, it takes from the peasant in taxes the product 
of his sweat and toil, leaving him barely enough to 
live. There are no schools to teach the peasant. The 
high Russian officer, the lieutenant colonel who 
guarded us from St. Petersburg to Moscow, said, 
"The peasant wants no schools." Thus, he never 
learns his rights, the rights God wills to him. 
He keeps on toiling year in and year out, and the 
government of the Czar squeezes from him his tears, 
his blood, his kopeeJcs, his life ! And these men I saw 
were white men and owned the land, fat, fertile land, 
rejoicing ever in abundant crops ! 

A century ago, even thus were also the peas- 
ants of France ground down and pillaged by the 
King, the nobility, the government of the state. As 
I traveled through the fruitful valley of the Loire 
two years ago, crossing central France, and beheld 
the smiling fields and well-planted meadows and per- 
petual cultivation of every foot of soil, until the 
whole land bloomed and bore crops like one mighty 
garden, I could not help wondering, as I looked upon 
the smiling countenance of the terrain, and upon the 
contented faces of the sturdy and thrifty peasantry 
who owned and tilled it, whether this present fecundity 
and agricultural wealthiness of rural France, does not, 
after all, repay the world and even France herself, 
for the terrors and the tears, the blood and the ob- 
literation of the Vancien regime, whose expungement 



REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA INEVITABLE. 199 

by the Revolution alone made possible to-day a re- 
generated and rejoicing France. 

We have passed through Minsk, the ancient capital 
of Lithuania, a city of more than one hundred thou- 
sand inhabitants of whom more than half are Jews, 
and through Brzesc (pronounced "Brest"), another 
city as big as Smolensk and renowned as a fortress, 
taken and retaken, lost and relost, through all the 
weary centuries of Polish-Muskovite wars. We have 
crossed the river Bug ("Boog") on a fine steel 
bridge, and entering pillaged Poland, are now arrived 
within the borders of her great capital, Warsaw 
("Barcoba," *'Varsova"), wfhere we change to a 
train of German cars, of the narrower German gauge, 
and go on to Berlin. 

Just after leaving Minsk, I fell into conversation 
with a most intelligent young Jew from Warsaw, 
who, among other things, spoke of Russia and her 
ways, saying that, strange as it may seem, the people 
of Poland prefer her harsh rule to the fairer dealing 
of the Germans, for the reason that Pole and Russ 
both talk a Slavic tongue, and race affinity constitutes 
a bond. Yet said he at the same time, all Poles dream 
of the day when a Polish King shall again fill a Polish 
throne, and the glories of their Fatherland shall be 
restored. 

We reached Warsaw only two hours late and pulled 
into the large stone station close alongside the Berlin 
train. The porter grabs our bags. Our small steamer 
trunk is shown to hold no vodka, nor contraband 



200 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

effects. ''Nach Berlin," I shout, and we are trans- 
ferred to a clean, comfortable German car. Gott sei 
Dank! we feel a thousand times. We are almost 
free, almost escaped, almost beyond the Russian pale. 
For a fortnight, we have been under constant, con- 
scious, persistent surveillance. Our guides have 
been in the employ of the police; strange men have 
followed us about upon the streets, have sat beside 
us in hotels, have scrutinized us with cold eyes upon 
the trains. We have been under the direct guard of 
armed soldiers, who have stood outside our stateroom 
door and slept beside us all the night. We have 
never, since entering Russia, been free from the 
weasel-wit and ferret-eye of incessant espionage! 

And the dirt! Dirty cars! Dirty hotels! Dirty 
carriages! Dirty streets! Dirty churches! Dirty 
palaces ! Dirty men ! Dirty women ! Such is Russia, 
a land where the world knows not water, except to 
skate upon when turned to ice. 

Now we are in a German car, immaculately clean! 
Clean, almost, as it would be in Norway! We are 
in the modern world again, I feel great pressure in 
my heart to "Hoch der Kaiser/' and this despite 
the fact that, like every right-minded American, I 
am bred to abhor the assumptions of HohenzoUern 
Kaisership even as strenuously as Romanoff Autoc- 
racy. Yes ! I feel great impulse to Hoch der Kaiser 
and to cheer for Germany and my German kin. 



xxn. 

The Slav and the Jew — The Slav's Envy and 
Jealousy of the Jew* 

Now that I have had a glimpse of Russia, you ask 
me, ' ' Why is the Slav always so eager to do to death 
the Jew?" Wherefore this hatred which so con- 
stantly flames out in grievous pillage and wanton 
murder and blood-thirsty massacre of the children of 
Israel ? 

You say to me that in America for two centuries 
we have had the Jew; that we now have millions of 
Jews, and that they are patriotic and loyal citizens 
of the Republic; that Jews sit in our highest courts 
and render able and fair decisions, enter the senate 
of the United States and sit in congress, are sent to 
West Point and Annapolis and prove themselves de- 
voted and efficient officers of the army and navy, are 
lawyers and doctors and distinguished members of the 
learned professions; that they display intelligence, 
industry and thrift, and are among the foremost 
citizens of the Republic, and that many of these 
Jews, or their fathers and mothers, have come direct 
from Russia. And you ask me "Why is it then that 
within the dominion of the Czar the Slav makes 
such constant war upon the Jew?" 

(201) 



202 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

If I were briefly to sum up my impressions of the 
real cause of the Slav's hatred of the Jew, I should 
say, JEALOUSY and envy, and then ask you to remem- 
ber that the Slav is yet at heart a semi- Asiatic and a 
barbarian. 

When journeying from St. Petersburg to Moscow 
the Russian lieutenant-colonel said to me : "In Amer- 
ica you select real men for Presidents of whom Roose- 
velt is the finest type, but in France the JEWS and 
financiers set up their tool for President. " In a nut 
shell this high Russian officer expressed the feeling 
of his own race toward the Jew. The Jew is a Jew 
and the Jew is a financier. The Russians are jealous 
■of his acquired wealth and of his ability to gather it 
and they hate him. 

A few days later, traveling from Moscow to War- 
saw, we found ourselves sitting in a dining car with 
an elaborate bill of fare before us and yet we were 
like to starve right then and there. The menu was 
printed in Russian ; the attendants and waiters talked 
nothing but Russian, We knew no Russian and spoke 
in English, in German, in French, in Danish without 
avail. The servants just stood there shaking their 
heads and saying, ^'Nyett, Nyett." C'No, No.") 
We were famishing but could order no food. Just 
then a tall woman of courtly manner, elegantly 
gowned, came toward us from another table and said 
in perfect English that she had long lived in London, 
though now she resided in Russia, and then, giving 
our orders to the waiters, she saved us from impend- 



THE SLAV AND THE JEW. 203 

ing famine. She afterward told me that her passport 
had lapsed, and that the Russian Government now re- 
fused to let her leave Russia because she was a Jewess, 
while at the same time, they forbade her to remain 
longer in Moscow, she having recently become a 
widow, and under the harsh laws of Russia there- 
by lost her right of domicile within the city. She 
hoped to escape to America by bribing the officials at 
the border. 

At Vilna, I fell into acquaintance with a young 
Pole from Warsaw, who spoke seven languages and 
among them German and English fluently, although 
he had never been outside the dominions of the Czar, 
He was a strict Jew, and he expressed great surprise 
when I assured him that in America a Jew is treated 
just the same as a Christian. He said he had heard 
that to be indeed really the fact, and he expressed 
the intention of some day coming to America to see 
for himself. He seemed both perplexed and gratified 
when he found that I showed him the same considera- 
tion I did my Gentile acquaintances. 

In Moscow we drove past the imposing front of the 
great Jewish Synagogue. The doors were barred. The 
structure was falling into decay. I learned that it had 
been closed for nigh twenty years by order of the Im- 
perial Governor of Moscow, Prince Vladimir, uncle of 
the Czar ; nor might any Synagogue now be opened in 
Moscow ; nor might any Jew now worship in any edi- 
fice ; nor might any outside Jew now come and live in 
Moscow; nor might any Jew living in Moscow come 



204 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

back if he had once left the limits of the city; nor 
might he own any land in the city, nor practice a pro- 
fession ; nor might he marry a Christian, nor might a 
Christian marry him. The Jews were also subjected to 
extra and particular special taxes, arbitrarily levied 
and collected by the autocratic government. The Jew, 
right here in ''Holy Moscow," soul and heart-center 
of the vast Russian Empire, was pillaged under the 
autocratic rule of the Czar, persecuted under the 
hand of the Holy Orthodox Church, plagued and 
preyed upon by a perpetually jealous and malevolent 
populace. 

The Russian army officer sneering at Monsieur 
Loubet, President of Prance, whom he called the 
"tool of Jews and Financiers;" the courtly Jewish 
lady; the intelligent Jewish merchant of Warsaw, 
who was so much astonished that I should show him 
the courtesy of an equal, the lowly izvostchik driv- 
ing me in his droscKky and pointing out the closed 
and moldering Synagogue; each and all discovered 
in their divers ways the attitude of the Slav toward 
the Jew; and the officer revealed in his criticism of 
the ruler of Russia's ally, the Republic of France, the 
real underlying secret cause of the Russian's ani- 
mosity and hatred of the Jew. That cause of hatred 
is the Jew's ability to prosper without and in spite 
of the fostering care of the autocracy 

The Jew was a cultivated citizen-of-the-world when 
the Slavic ancestors of the Russian were unlettered 
nomads roving the illimitable wastes of Scythia. In 



THE SLAV AND THE JEW. 205 

the temples and libraries of ancient Egypt the Jew 
acquired the culture and the learning of the Pharaohs ; 
amidst the palaces and hanging-gardens of Imperial 
Babylon and Nineveh the Jew learned the arts and 
the sciences of the Assyrian and Persian; Plato and 
Aristotle and the Greek philosophers recognized in the 
Jew a spiritual culture of exalted type, and granted 
him to possess a learning as encompassing as their 
own; the Roman, practical, and master of the then 
known world, paid homage to the cultivated intelli- 
gence of the Jew. 

The monotonous plains of Russia were yet filled with 
nomadic hordes of pagan barbarians when Cordova 
was a paved city, its streets illuminated by night, its 
libraries and its University the center of the most 
advanced learning of the age; when the gigantic 
and splendid cathedrals of England and France were 
everywhere raising their mighty walls and spires for. 
the perpetual glory of God and the inspiration of man- 
kind; when the fleets of Lisbon and Genoa were dis- 
covering the farthest and most distant splendors of 
the Orient and Occident; when Venice was mistress 
of Byzantium and Florence patron of Rome; when 
Hebrew savants, under the benign influence of 
Saracen rule, were among the most learned and re- 
nowned leaders of Moslem science; when the Israel- 
ites of Italy and France were intermarried among the 
proudest of the nobility and were even counselors of 
Kings; when Hebrew learning and Hebrew wealth 
gave added momentum to the impulse of the Renais- 



206 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

sance. "While during the centuries of the world's re- 
awakening, even as during the preceding centuries of 
the Crusades, just as throughout the long duration 
of the dominion of Rome and of the Eastern Empire, 
the Jew was ever recognized for his learning, culture 
and wealth. 

"When St. Cyril and his Byzantine monks, in the 
seventh century, gave Greek Christianity to the Rus- 
sian Pagan, the Russian yet remained content with 
outward forms and ceremonies. He continued pagan 
at heart and persevered in worshiping the ancient 
ghosts and spirits, even as in many parts of Russia 
he does to-day. He put on a Christian coat, but he 
kept his pagan hide ; and the Russian Orthodox Chris- 
tian has always remained a semi-pagan. 

The great mass of the Russian people were serfs 
sold with the land up to 1860, when Alexander II 
gave them nominal freedom, but a freedom without 
lands and without schools; a so-called freedom which 
has left the individual peasant, the mujik, as land- 
less, as bitterly poor, as benightedly ignorant to-day 
as he was a thousand years ago; nor does the 
autocratic-bureaucracy of the Czar give him hope 
of a better day. I journeyed through some of the 
richest farming lands in Russia, and the farmers, the 
mujiks, whom I saw tilling the soil, plowing and 
digging in the fields, were so poor that their feet were 
wrapped in plaited straw, too impoverished to afford 
the luxury of a leathern boot! The government ab- 
sorbs all the profits of the crops in payment for these 



THE SLAV AND THE JEW. 207 

lands and in taxes, as return for having made the 
mujiks nominal owners of the soil and emancipating 
them from serfdom. 

On the other hand, the nobles are forbidden by 
caste spirit and tradition to enter into any career 
except the service of the state. The younger nobles 
and ruling breeds among the Russian people are all 
sucked into the employ of the state by the maelstrom 
of bureaucracy. The youths of the nobility and 
gentry, and the more or less educated classes, must 
enter the navy, the army, and the service of the 
state. A government job for life is their only hope. 
They are not permitted to make money for themselves 
independently; they can only make money for the 
government of the Czar and for themselves through 
"Graft." 

The government wishes to do everything in Russia. 
It deliberately invades the spheres of private enter- 
prise; it deliberately seeks all the profit; it deliber- 
ately destroys the ambition and the power of the 
person; it deliberately annihilates and stifles indi- 
vidual initiative. In Russia, the government runs 
all the railroads, most of the mines, many of the iron 
mills. It raises cotton ; it raises wheat ; it farms and 
it manufactures. It buys and sells. It runs all the 
telegraphs and telephones and express business. It 
opens all private letters and reads all the printed 
books and newspapers. It permits no letter to go 
through the mails, nor book nor newspaper to be read, 
which it deems to express sentiments inimical to the 



■208 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

supremacy of the autocracy. I was threatened with 
imprisonment in Russia for snapping a kodak with- 
out government permit. I was under police and mil- 
itary supervision and escort all the time I traveled in 
Hussia, even short as it was. Nor did I dare to send 
a letter to America from Russia, but wrote my 
thoughts with locked doors, and mailed my writings 
only when safe beyond the eye of the Russian govern- 
ment spy. 

Thus we find that, on the one hand, the peasantry 
are crushed, thrust down and pitilessly held in ig- 
norance and superstition and bitter poverty; on the 
other hand, all the best ability and brains of the 
governing classes are commandeered into the army, or 
navy, or life-long government service, and with 
meager salaries and small pay. The big grafts, the 
soft snaps, the juicy chances must all belong to the 
government and flow into the coffers of the Czar to 
keep fat and easy the Imperial family and the swarms 
of parasitic tid-bit hunters who leech them. 

But even in autocratic Russia, the grasping clutch 
of autocracy cannot hold up all the avenues of 
commerce, however far-reaching its embrace may be. 
Hence, in those lines of enterprise, not absorbed 
and appropriated by the government, there is left 
open a clear path to whosoever may have the acumen 
to seize the opportunity. Here is the chance of the 
Jew. Endowed with a keen and subtle intellect, edu- 
cated by his own masters often to the highest train- 
ing of the intelligence and disciplined by the hard- 




A COLD DAY. 



THE SLAV AND THE JEW. 209 

ships of persecution, he is at once an overmatch for 
the ignorant, brutal, poverty-haunted mujik, and 
fully the equal of the best breeds of governing Slavs. 
Those intellects which are the equals of his own are 
not in competition with him. The ablest of the Slavs 
are earning a small salary in the army, in the navy, 
or as government officials; making what they can for 
themselves by more or less open graft, it is true, but 
without the incentive of other personal gain. So the 
Jew gets on in Russia. This progress is in spite of 
the jealousy and the hatred and the pillaging hand 
of the envious Slav. 

There is, here and there, considerable wealth among 
many of the Jews in Russia. This is not true of all 
the Jews. Most of the Jews are poor, frightfully 
poor, made and kept so by the laws; but there is 
wealth among some of the Jews. The few wealthy 
Jews do not always keep these riches within the do- 
minions of the Czar. The Russians complain that the 
rich Jews, while making their money in Russia, yet 
lay it up in the banks of Berlin, of Vienna, of Paris 
and particularly of London. When a Russian Gov- 
ernor wishes to squeeze a little extra pocket money 
out of the Jews of his district, his city, his province, 
he cannot always lay hands on their money hoards. 
Sometimes, then, he lets the street urchins plague 
them a little; the squeezed and squalid peasant is 
allowed to vent his envy of their wealth, even to 
knocking a Jew down; now and then, these meanly- 
minded boys, these pinch-bellied peasants get out of 
14 



210 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

hand and, stung by their blood lust, too hastily mas- 
sacre more Jews than the Governor intended. This 
is about the size of the job that Governor Von Raaben 
found to his credit in Kischineff. The poor Jews 
suffered for the prosperity of their rich brethren. 
The embittered and down-crushed mujik, galled and 
soured by reason of his own hapless and seemingly 
hopeless condition, vented his spleen at the first handy 
object, and the Jew was handier, though not more 
hated, than the uniformed official of the governing 
autocracy. 

The Russian, as an individual, is of a kindly na- 
ture. He is good to his wife, good to his children, 
good to his beasts. He has none of the Roman-Spanish 
pitilessness to dumb creatures. But the Russian, 
after all, is an Asiatic. The old saying, "Scratch a 
Russian and you'll find a Tartar," is as true to-day 
as when the Cossacks of Catherine II impaled and 
crucified men and women and children of the fleeing 
Mongol horde, when these simply sought to migrate 
beyond the hectoring reach of Russian rule. 

No bloodier chapter mars the annals of history 
than that of the Russian slaughter of nigh the entire 
Tekke Turkoman race in her warfare of 1881 
on the shores of the Caspian, at Geok Tepe, 
when seven thousand women and children were 
stricken down in cold blood as they fled from Kuro- 
patkin's ruthless Cossacks. 

Nor is the world done shuddering yet at the atro- 
cious barbarities under General Gribski, Governor 




A RUSSIAN JEW. 



THE SLAV AND THE JEW. 211 

of Blagoveschensk, who commanded the deliberate 
drowning of the Chinese inhabitants of that city but 
a few years ago, in 1898, and in a season of pre- 
vailing peace, drove them before the knouts and 
bayonets of his Cossacks into the hopeless waters of 
the river Amoor by unnumbered thousands, old men 
and women and little children, so that for many 
weeks, nay months, the great river was so choked with 
the swollen bodies of the dead that navigation was at 
a standstill. 

No Roman sack and pillage of a conquered city, 
not even the taking and wreck of Jerusalem by Titus 
and his legions, equals in horror and cold blood these 
late Russian slaughters; not even the fire and sword 
of Attila and his avenging Huns wrought such woe 
and terror as have been wrought in these recent years 
by the servants of the Czar; nor are the tormented 
souls of Alva and his Spanish veterans more deeply 
marked with blood-soaked scars than is the Russian 
autocracy of to-day ; nor mediaeval, nor modern times, 
nor pagan, nor Moslem warfare, have known so mon- 
strous a series of godless massacres of helpless hu- 
mankind as those now standing to the credit of the 
Russian autocracy during the last twenty-five years. 

The crime of Kischineff is no more heinous than 
have been the slaughters of Geok Tepe, Blagoves- 
chensk and a thousand lesser human killings, nor 
more heart-sickening than were those awful visita- 
tions of Slavic blood-lust upon creatures defenseless, 
helpless, abjectly terror-struck. It is only that it was 



212 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

committed in a season of profound peace, against a 
peaceful people, and at a time when all the world had 
the leisure to hear the dying wails of the hapless 
women and helpless children raped and ravished and 
torn asunder in the open day. 

Notwithstanding these crimes which mar the pages 
of recent Russian history, none would be more as- 
tonished than the Eussian himself, if he were made 
aware of the world-wide condemnation these crimes 
provoke. He would protest against so harsh an esti- 
mate of Russian conquest; at most, when confronted 
with the facts, he would shrug his shoulders and urge 
that the responsibility lies not upon Holy Russia, 
but upon those who oppose her destiny to conquer 
and absorb. The thoughtful Russian will declare that 
after all it is no more than the inevitable struggle 
of the survival of the fittest, and demonstrate that 
there are no feuds of race, other than the universal 
hatred of the Jew, within the dominions of the Czar. 

From the Russian viewpoint these arguments are 
not unreasonable; the vast military establishment 
upon which rests the autocracy, necessitates foreign 
wars with weaker peoples, if for no other reason than 
to keep a busied soldiery from thinking too much upon 
grievances at home; through commercial expansion 
in Asia, won by bayonet and sword, the autocracy 
has sought to secure compensation for the suppres- 
sion of commercial opportunity at home ! 

The problems of Russia are, after all, economic 
rather than racial, and it is up to Russia to solve these 



THE SLAV AND THE JEW. 213 

m accordance with the lessons and example of the 
enlightened nations of the west; let the nobility and 
educated classes, who are now sucked into and ab- 
sorbed by the bureaucracy, take full part in the 
commercial and industrial life of the empire and 
receive full reward for the exercise of their energy, 
intelligence and skill ; let them lift from the mujik the 
crushing weight of the Imperial taxes, divide with him 
the almost illimitable acreage of the Imperial domain ; 
and leave to him his fair share of the earnings won 
by his sweat and toil, and there will be no more Geok 
Tepes, Blagoveschensks, nor Kischineffs, nor will there 
be longer hatred of the Jew. 



xxm. 

Across Germany and Holland to England — A Ham- 

hutg "Wein Stube, the ''Simple Fishet-Folk'* 

of Maarken — ^Two Gt»Iden at 

Den Haag* 

London, England, 
Hotel Russell, September 27, 1902 

Crossing the Russian border in the night, we ar- 
rived at Berlin almost before the dawn; the city lies 
only three hours (by train) beyond the Russian line. 

The station we entered was spacious and clean, in 
sharp contrast to the dirty stations of Russia ; we were 
evidently come into a land blessed with a civilization 
of higher type. Leaving the ear, we were instantly 
beset by a regiment of smartly uniformed porters — 
old soldiers all of them — and were piloted by one tall 
veteran to a waiting fiacre, which soon carried us to 
the Hotel Savoy. It was early, not yet five o 'clock, but 
the streets were already alive with an orderly and ani- 
mated throng, who appeared to be workmen largely, 
carpenters, masons and day-laborers, each clad in his 
distinctive laborer's garb. They were on their way to 
work, for the working day is long in Germany, ten 
and twelve hours, and the workingman is up betimes. 

(214) 



WE ARRIVE IN BERLIN. 215 

"We passed over asphalted streets where men in mili- 
tary-looking uniforms, with hose in hand, were wash- 
ing down their surfaces, while others with big coarse 
brooms were sweeping them clean. Berlin is a clean 
city, clean and neat as the proverbial German in 
America is known to be. Alighting from our carriage, 
I was greeted in my own tongue, by the friendly man- 
nered concierge, who instantly marked me for an 
American, and gave us comfortable quarters such as 
American dollars usually secure. 

H and I were now alone, our companions, Mr. and 
Mrs. C having left us at Warsaw, where they would 
spend a week or two and learn something of Poland. 
Perhaps I might tell you right here, that the next 
morning, as we were leaving the hotel, I felt a hand 
upon my shoulder and, turning round, faced the two 
Chicago travelers just then arrived. They had cut 
short their stay in Warsaw, for the only American- 
speaking guide in that city was away on a vacation, 
and German and French to them were as impossible 
as Polish. They confessed, also, that they had sorely 
missed their American fellow-travelers, and had hur- 
ried after us, hoping they might induce us to sojourn 
a little while in their good company. 

We spent our single day without trying to see 
museums and picture galleries, but taking a guide and 
a carriage, drove about the city and viewed its ave- 
nues and parks, its markets and busy thoroughfares, 
and noble public buildings, to catch what glimpse we 
might of the waxing Capital of the German Empire. 



216 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

The first impression Berlin makes upon the stranger, 
especially the stranger new-come from Russia, is that 
of its cleanliness and orderliness ; and, I think, I here 
also felt the sympathy of blood-kinship with the well 
set-up and neatly clad men and women, whose faces 
might have been those of my fellow countrymen of St. 
Louis, Cincinnati or New York. Berliuj to-day, fitly 
typifies modem Germany and the modern German 
spirit. "We drove everywhere over smooth streets, 
kept scrupulously clean. On either hand stretched 
miles of new and handsome buildings, modem in 
architecture and modern in construction, while the 
signs I saw were in Latin Text, instead of the Gothic, 
a striking evidence of German progression. 

When we came to the lovely Unter Den Linden, we 
left the carriage and wandered beneath its umbrage- 
ous trees and enjoyed, as every one must, the beauty 
of its vistas of greensward and carefully tended 
flowers. The German loves his flowers almost as de- 
votedly as does his English cousin. We strolled also 
along the famous Thier Garten, which would be a 
magnificent boulevard in any city; and which the 
German Kaiser has sought to ornament with innumer- 
' able ponderous groups of sculpture, preserving for 
the astonished world the commonplace memories of 
paltry ancestors. How much better would it have 
been to have adorned this stately thoroughfare with 
statues of illustrious Germans, whose great deeds and 
works have contributed to the world's enlightenment 
and the Fatherland 's renown ! To a Democrat, bred 



GERMAN MILITARISM. 217 

to contemn the empty glitter and pretense of inherited 
privilege, it almost stirs one 's anger to see so splendid 
a public highway as the Thier Garten thus arrogantly 
defaced. 

In this Capital of an Empire, whose foundation is 
set on bayonets and swords and the ''biggest guns," 
where militarism runs riot, there is no surprise in 
finding the streets filled with soldiers and officers, and 
to meet frequently a marching company, nor does it 
astonish one to see here the extreme development of 
the spirit of military caste. Here, the civilian, man 
as well as woman — no matter how well clad he or 
she may be — must turn aside for strutting officer and 
also, as for that, for the common soldier, and all 
traffic must hold back to let a company of soldiery 
pass by, even though they are out only on errand of 
trivial exercise. Here in Germany, perhaps as no- 
where else, have the clever supporters of Royal and 
Imperial pretension worked the army racket to the 
limit, through creating a perpetual scare that greedy 
neighbors will devour the Fatherland. The citizen 
of Berlin is never allowed to forget that little more 
than a century ago, Cossack hordes pastured their 
ponies in the parks and gardens of the German cap- 
ital; and can gallop there again from their Polish 
camps in a single day. The army has been built up 
on the pretense that it is necessary for national de- 
fense, and thus the Kaiser, who is permitted to oc- 
cupy the position of army chief, holds at his com- 
mand these enormous military forces, while he uses 



218 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

them the rather to exalt his own prerogative and sub- 
vert the people's inborn rights of individual sov- 
ereignty, which is the highest gift of God to man. 

The splendid building of the Reichstag, where the 
Socialist party of Germany, to-day, makes its almost 
vain attempt toward securing to the people a freer 
exercise of man's natural rights, is thus menaced by 
the colossal military group which stands before it, 
.as though to teach the lesson that the sword still rules 
the Fatherland. 

In the evening, our guide, who had privately con- 
fessed to me that within the year he would travel to 
New York there to become manager of a great hotel, 
led us to one of the more notable Bier Garten, where 
we saw a most German vaudeville, the feats of whose 
performers were greeted with vociferous hochs, 
and where we listened to a splendid band, and where 
H had her first sight of ponderous Germans absorb- 
ing beer, with which spectacle she was much im- 
pressed. 

Wednesday, we were early astir, driving to the 
Hamburgischer Bahnhoff, where we took the fast nine 
o'clock express for Hamburg, and flew along over a 
well-ballasted road-bed through a dead-flat country, 
in what the Germans proudly call their "fastest" 
train. The panorama was one of market gardens and 
intensely cultivated land. It was a monotonous pros- 
pect, where the alikeness of the vistas was empha- 
sized by the sentinel stiffness of the ever recurring 
rows of Lombardy-poplars. As in Russia, men and 



ANCIENT HAMBURG. 219 

women were everywhere working in the fields and 
gardens, but unlike Russia, they were well clad and 
well fed, and bore an air of thrifty contentment. 
There was no dilapidation anjnvhere. We saw no 
longer the tumbled-down shacks of the mujih, but 
everywhere substantial, neat homesteads of brick and 
stone. 

Ours was a through train connecting with the Ham- 
burg-American Line of steamers for New York, and 
with the through railway express traffic for France 
and Belgium, via Cologne. The passengers were 
chiefly of the well-to-do commercial classes, or those 
substantial travelers who would hasten quickly be- 
tween Germany and France. None the less, at the few 
stations where we halted, did the entire company in- 
stantly burst forth, hastening to the long counters, 
where they convulsively swallowed foaming schooners 
of beer and eagerly devoured sundry dainties, such 
as rye bread spread with goose grease and over-laid 
with kraut or wurst, and varnished pretzels salted 
to the limit. Even the babies were held at the open 
windows and foaming mugs of beer poured into them 
by their fond parents. The passion of the German 
for his hier equals the Russian's thirst for vodka. 

We reached Hamburg a little after half past one, 
when, taking a fiacre, we immediately drove to Cook's 
Tourists' Agency, where I booked to London, via 
Amsterdam, The Hague, the Hook of Holland, and 
Harwich. Then, for an hour, we strolled about the 
city. 



220 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

Hamburg possesses fine retail shops and abounds', 
in restaurants, Bier-Keller and Wein-Stuben, estab- 
lishments devoted to the solace of the inner man. 

Stricken with hunger-pangs, and not knowing just 
where to go, I accosted a taU and prosperous-looking 
burger, telling him we were Americans in search of 
food. Lifting his hat, he "begged to be allowed' to 
guide us to the finest Wein Stube" in the town, 
whither his own steps were at that moment bent. He 
led the way to a quiet side street, where, descending 
a flight of stone steps, he introduced us to the portly 
master of the stube. We entered a succession of large 
cellars, paneled and ceiled in oak and floored with 
patterned tiles, where small round-topped wooden 
tables were set about. We were conducted to a cozy 
comer, and Rhine wine, cheese, sausage and fresh rye 
bread were set before us, as well as mustard and sour 
pickles and pats of sweet unsalted butter, and to this 
was added a palatable stew. 

The room was filled with men — ^big, well-fed, 
well-clothed men, apparently merchants, ship-masters 
and men of affairs. They fell-to upon their flagons 
of wein, their wurst and kraut, their iraten and 
fisch with serious and deliberate devotion. It was 
that time of day when, in America, the prospering 
businessman eats lightly, smokes sparingly and 
touches liquor not at all, holding his intellect alert 
and whetted to its keenest edge. We watched with 
wonder these men of Hamburg, while they poured 
down quart after quart of wine, the air growing thick 




OUR BILL OF FARE. 



IN A WEIN STUBE. 221 

mth the fumes of strong tobacco. This capacity of 
Hans to eat heavily and mightily liquor-up and yet 
transact affairs, bespeaks a hardness of head and 
toughness of stomach which ranks him neck and neck 
alongside his cousin Bull as co-champion of the bibu- 
lating, gastronomizing world. 

Although H was the only woman in the stube, 
being recognized as Americans, we were treated by 
the company with greatest courtesy and that invari- 
able friendliness with which, in Germany, my country- 
men are everywhere received. 

Upon departing, Mein Host presented me with an 
attractive little ash-tray to add to my collection of 
souvenirs and, with much ceremony, bestowed also 
upon mine frau an illuminated catalogue of his store 
of wines. 

Later, we entered a comfortable landau and for 
several hours were driven about the city. Hamburg 
has always been an important city and one where 
great volume of business has been transacted. In the 
Middle Ages it was a member of the Hanseatic League ; 
in after days it was a Free City and, even at this time, 
its citizens view its absorption within the German Em- 
pire not altogether with satisfaction. It bears the 
marks of great antiquity. Quaint and picturesque 
are the lofty mediaeval buildings which lean over its 
canals, where men and women push, with long poles, 
blunt-ended canal boats and clumsy-looking, but 
storm-proof, sloops and luggers, among perpetual 
«ries and cLamoi-s; where sturdy black tug boats in- 



222 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

cessantly shove their way; and where is a jam and 
jostle of inland water-life not unlike that seen in 
Holland. Many narrow streets cross these canals on 
high-built bridges, bearing a continuous and delib- 
erately-moving traffic. 

Hamburg also possesses noble boulevards, long and 
straight and wide, and well-shaded with umbrageous 
lindens, where, set back behind high walls and 
strong-barred gates, are miles of sumptuous mansions, 
in which her merchant princes maintain their house- 
holds in unostentatious luxury. The wealth of the 
merchants of Hamburg is said to exceed that of the 
aristocratic office-holding classes of Berlin. 

There are also spacious docks in Hamburg, con- 
venient and modernly equipped, where, year by year, 
gathers an increasing shipping to fetch and carry the 
rapidly developing foreign commerce of the German 
Empire. The wealth and energy of the German 
Hinterlands pours itself eagerly into Hamburg's lap 
and the ancient mediaeval city now finds itself, un- 
like somnolent Copenhagen, at the very forefront of 
Europe's activity. Hamburg is, commercially, more 
alive and active than Berlin, and as a port receives 
more shipping than London. Hamburg is almost as 
wide awake as is New York. 

After our drive, we came to the Hotel Europaer, 
where we dined and rested, and then departed a little 
before midnight for Amsterdam. Although this is the 
regular passenger service to Holland, there was no 
through sleeper, and we were compelled to change at 




A KINDER OF MAARKEN. 




A GENTLEMAN OF MAARKEN. 



THE FISHER FOLK OF MAARKEN. 22S 

Oestenburg, where we caught the night express from 
Cologne. Then in a comfortable ''schlafwagen/' 
wrapped in our sea-rugs, we slept soundly the bal- 
ance of the night. 

We arrived at Amsterdam near eight o'clock and 
found our way to the Hotel Victoria, near the station, 
where I enjoyed such delicious coffee two years ago, 
and there we breakfasted: coffee, — a great pot of 
fragrant Java, — abundant milk, sweet and delicious, 
— rolls and big fresh eggs, and a fish which much re- 
sembled the Danish roed spoette and English sole. 
It was a delightful breakfast, such as one is always 
sure to have in Holland. 

Two years ago, I devoted my time to viewing the 
city, so now we resolved to see somewhat of the 
country beyond the limits of the town. Thus it hap- 
pened that we boarded a taut little boat in the mid- 
morning and all day long steamed through canals, 
with many locks, passing above picturesque farm- 
steads and villages, down upon which we looked from 
the higher level of the diked-up waters, and floated at 
last upon the Zuyder Zee. We later visited the Island 
of Maarken with its fisher-folk in quaint and ancient 
costume. Once ''simple peasants," but now, alas! 
ruined by the staring, money-shedding tourist. We 
had scarcely set foot upon the Island, when we were 
stormed by a horde of men and women, boys and 
girls, each demanding "mooney," and imploring us 
to snap the kodak at them for the cash; begging us 
also to visit their particular homes, where we would 



224 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

be allowed to look inside the door, and perhaps in- 
spect the house, for more Dutch cents and even 
gulden. So persistent were these "simple fisher- 
folk" that I almost fell into dire mishap. H sug- 
gested she should take my photograph, whereupon I 
arranged myself before the camera, when, just as the 
kodak clicked, a vrow and several kinderen rushed 
up and took position by my side, thus necessarily ap- 
pearing in the picture, as you will see. The lady 
backed by her brood thereupon demanded, "Mooney, 
mooney, mooney." Naturally, I refused to pay for 
what had been given without request. The little com- 
pany immediately raised a loud lament, at sound of 
which an immense and bow-legged fisherman appeared 
upon the scene, lifting a great oar and threatening 
my annihilation, unless money were put up. How- 
ever, I was firm and fearless, and finally convinced 
him that I had not requested the family to stand be- 
fore the lens, while I showed him I had already added 
half a gulden to his chest for inspection of the home. 
Comprehending this at last, his anger then turned 
upon his spouse, and he sulkily drove her and the 
kinderen within their door, using language that 
sounded much like the English damn. 

Leaving the Island, we came home across the Zee 
and passed through the huge new locks of the River 
Amstel, the ''Dam" of which, keeping out the waters 
of the Zuyder Zee, gives to the city its name,— J.m- 
stel-dam. 



PASSING THKOUGH HOLLAND. 225 

The little boat we sailed upon was chiefly filled 
with Holland folk, for we were behind the tourist 
season. They were a quiet, undemonstrative company 
and, on the deck, sat about in little groups and were 
served with Schiedam schnapps in small glasses by 
white-aproned waiters and smoked long, light-colored 
Sumatra cigars. The proverbial Hollander, fat and 
chunky with an enormous pipe, is now a mere tradi- 
tion. The Dutchman of to-day, like his English cousin, 
is long and lean, and might almost be taken for a 
New England Yankee. 

An hour by rail brought us to ''Den Haag." We 
passed among broad meadows, marked by wide black 
ditches from which gigantic pumps incessantly suck 
out the seeping waters and pour them into the sea. 
These meadows were once the bottom of the ocean, 
the soil being composed of the rich alluvial silt which 
the continental rivers have for centuries discharged. 
Indeed, Holland may be said to consist of the sub- 
merged deltas of the rivers Scheldt and Rhine, which 
the indefatigable industry of man has rescued from 
the sea. These lands are of inexhaustible fertility and 
upon them, everywhere, we saw grazing herds of 
black-and-white Holstein cows, whence come the 
butter and cheese for which Holland is famous, 
and the delicious milk which is so abundantly 
offered us at every meal. The roadbed ran 
high above the meadows, down upon which we 
looked. Here and there we espied a cluster of 
•15 



226 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

neat farm buildings, reminding me much of the Dutch 
homesteads along the Hudson River valley, and 
stretching from Albany along the Mohawk, in New 
York, — ^with this difference, however, that here, each 
house and bam and garden lay surrounded with its 
own diminutive canal, where were little foot-bridges 
and skiffs fastened near the kitchen door, even a 
large canal boat being often moored against a barn, 
the better to float away the loaded hay. The Dutch- 
man finds life intolerable unless he has his own canal 
right at his threshold. 

Farther along, the landscape was marked with in- 
numerable windmills turning their ponderous arms 
slowly to the breeze which crept in from the sea; we 
counted I do not know how many, there seemed never 
to be an end. The people we saw were stout and rosy- 
cheeked, and moved with less alertness than do the 
Norwegians, nor did they have about them that air 
of busy-ness which the modern German begins to 
show. The impression made by the Hollander is that 
of sureness and deliberation. The cocky strut of the 
Frenchman, who moves ever as though on dress- 
parade, is entirely wanting to the Hollander, whose 
demure exterior gives no hint of the wealth, the talent, 
the high importance hid within. 

The journey from Amsterdam to The Hague takes 
scarcely an hour, and before we knew it we drew in to 
the large station of the Dutch capital. The soldierly- 
clad porters are not here as numerous as in Germany, 
nor did those who served us move with so self-con- 




ALONG THE ZUYDER ZEE. 




A LOAD OF HAY, HOLLAND. 




DUTCH TOILERS. 




A WATERY LANE, DEN HAAG. 



TWO GULDEN AT DEN HAAG. 227 

scious and self-important a gait. Men in quiet, dark- 
blue uniforms quickly put our baggage into an open 
■fiacre and we drove to the hotel of the "Twe Stad- 
ten," a comfortable inn facing a large well-shaded 
"park," We were given a commodious chamber 
looking out upon a pretty garden and dined, at a 
later hour, in the long, low-ceilinged dining room. 
The guests were few, only one other party beside 
ourselves dining thus late. They were two tall 
and white-haired dames, gowned in black silk with 
much old lace round about the throat, and with them 
a petite and pretty Senorita, who spoke in Spanish 
and insisted upon puffing cigarettes. She led the way 
from the dining room smoking jauntily, the two chap- 
erones following respectfully behind. 

In the morning we spent delightful hours in the 
national picture galleries looking at the priceless col- 
lections of the Rembrandts and Rubens, which the 
Dutch government has here assembled; in the after- 
noon we strolled about the clean, quiet city, beneath 
the over-spreading elms; and then we supped at 
Scheveningen, where we saw the sea again and the 
last of the season's fashionable folk. 

A moment before leaving our hotel to take the 
train, which would carry us to The Hook, I had my 
last adventure among the canny Dutch. Upon the 
table in our chamber lay an attractive little ash- 
receiver, which any smoker must needs long to own. 
Quite naturally, it became entangled with our sundry 
purchases and scattered belongings and with them 



228 THROUGH SCANDINAVIA TO MOSCOW. 

was inadvertently put away. Just as we were quit- 
ting the apartment, the head waiter of the inn, in 
whose charge we seemed to be, burst in upon us with 
wild anxiety in his eye and explained in broken Eng- 
lish, that he instantly observed, upon scrutinizing the 
chamber, that a most valuable piece of Delft ware had 
mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps we had broken 
it? At any rate, it was gone and he would be held 
responsible for its loss. Two gulden would barely 
replace it! "What should he do?" Naturally, I ex- 
plained that my wife by mistake had probably packed 
it up, and begged him to advise the office that, upon 
settling my bill, it would give me pleasure to deposit 
two gulden against the loss. At a later time, when 
exhibiting this relic to wiser eyes, I was forced to 
recognize that the little ash-receiver was merely com- 
mon ware, of value perhaps ten Dutch cents! So 
much for the knowing Dutchman who traps the trav- 
eler in search of souvenirs ! 

Two hours after leaving The Hague we were upon 
the ship which would carry us to England. By early 
morning we were again at Harwich, and we arrived 
in London by mid-afternoon. Our only fellow pas- 
senger upon the train was a tall, dark, silent man, 
who carried with him an enormous overcoat of fur. 
We thought him a Russian, and wondered if he also 
had come directly from the Empire of the Czar. 

We are now returned to London, whence we de- 
parted five weeks ago. We have crossed the North 
Sea, and journeyed through Denmark, and Norway, 



RETURN TO LONDON. 229 

and Sweden, and visited their capitals. "We have 
voyaged across the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Fin- 
land; we have caught a passing glimpse of Helsing- 
fors, and looked upon St. Petersburg and Moscow, 
and traveled many hundred versts through the Em- 
pire of the Czar. We have sped through Germany 
and felt at home in the noble cities of Berlin and 
Hamburg. We have tarried in Amsterdam and Den 
Haag, where we felt the strangely familiar atmosphere 
of Dutch New York. We have looked upon many 
peoples of the Teutonic races and, when among them, 
have felt that subtle throb of kinship, which common 
blood and common origin awake ; we have also plunged 
a moment within the mediaeval and yet semi-bar- 
barous dominions of the Slav and found ourselves 
upon the threshold of mysterious Asia. 

We have everywhere been thankful in our hearts 
that we were born and bred beneath the Stars and 
Stripes in the great Republic of the West, where hope 
and opportunity are not merely our own, but are also 
the loadstars which beckon thither the youth and vigor 
of these older peoples of the World. 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Aabo Elv 89 

Alexander Nevsky Monastery 156 

Amagertorv, The 22 

American Belles and Viking Beaux 119 

American Dollars and Norse Farms Ill 

American Emigration from Norway 113 

American Influence on Norway 48 

American Navy, Norse Sailors in 53 

American Spirit 112 

Amsterdam 223 

Arctic Twilight, The 115 

Ash Receiver, Incident of 227 

Aurdals Vand, The 60 

Baegna Elv 60 

Baltic Sea, Crossing the 138 

Baltic Sea, A Storm on 140 

Bandaks Vand 108 

Belts, Big and Little 11 

Berlin, City of 216 

Berlin, Hotel at Moscow 169 

Bier Garten, Berlin 218 

Blagoveschensk 211 

Boerte Dal 107 

Borgund, Ancient Church of 72 

Breifond, Hotel 93 

Bruce Fjord 75 

Brute, A Titled 82 

Brzesc (Brest) 199 

Buarbrae Glacier, The 89 

Bug River 199 

Caste, Influence in Russia 207 

Cathedral of the Archangel Michael 175 

Cathedral St. Basil the Blessed 175 

Cathedral St. Savior 173 

Churches and Schools in Norway 104 

Churches, St. Petersburg 155 

Climate of Western Coast Norway 76 

Coasting Down the Laera Dal 71 

Condit, Mr. and Mrs 138 

Copenhagen 13 

Cossack Hordes 217 

Cruelty of Ivan the Terrible 176 

r23i) 



232 INDEX. 



PAGE 

Cruelty of Peter the Great • 187 

Cruelty of Past Czars 174 

Cruelty of Modern Russia 210 

Dalen 106 

Danish Friends, Our 11 

Democratic Trend in Sweden 126 

Denmark, A Small Country 28 

Dinner Party, An Evening 36 

Dining Service at Ed 44 

Discontent of Russian Masses 153 

Dogs of Copenhagen 24 

Dutch, Impressions of the 226 

Eida 84 

Eids Elv 110 

Eikon, The 171 

Elsinore 33 

Esbjerg 9 

Etna Elv, Along the 56 

Fagernaes 63 

Farming in Norway 71 

Fat Farm Lands of Russia 197 

Finland 142 

Finland, The Gulf of 145 

Flaa Vand 110 

Fleischer's Hotel 82 

Fog, The, leaving Harwich 3 

Folgefonden, Ice Field 89 

Fosheim 63 

France and the Jews 202 

France, Modern France, Contrasted with Russia 198 

French Fellow-travelers, Our 90-97 

Frydenlund, Night at 58-60 

Gammel Strand, The, Fish-market 23 

Geok Tepe 210 

German Bride, The Lovely 43 

German Fellow-travelers clamor for Bier, Our 97 

German Car, In a 200 

German Ogre Hungry for Denmark 19 

Germany, We Enter 214 

Germany, Journey to Hamburg 218 

Gors Vand 92 

Government Monopoly in Russia 207 

Graft, Mulcted for Passports 150-159-195 

Granheims Vand 62 

Gravens Vand 84 

Gribski, General 210^ 



INDEX. 233 



PAGE 

Grungedals Vand 106 

Gudvangen 78 

Gulden at Den Haag, Two 228 

Hague, The 228 

Hamburg 220 

Hamlet's Ghost and Grave 35 

Hangoe, We Make Port 140 

Hardanger Fjord, The 85 

Harvesting in Norway 65 

Harwich, Departure from 1-3 

Harwich, Return to 228 

Haukeli Fjeld, The 97 

Haukeli Fjeld, Descending from the 107 

Haymow Plying Through the Air 71 

Height of Land, Crossing above Nystuen 69 

Helsingborg 41 

Helsingfors 143 

Herring Catch at Elsinore 38 

Hoch der Kaiser 189 

Holger Danske, Legend of 35 

Holland, Passing Through 225 

Hollander of Today, The 225 

Hook of Holland, The 227 

Hotel Berlin, Moscow 169 

Hotel Breifond, Horre 92 

Hotel Continental, Stockholm 122 

Hotel Dagmar, Copenhagen 13 

Hotel de'l Europe, St. Petersburg 149 

Hotel Fleischer's, Voss, Norway 82 

Hotel Haukelid, Norway 97 

Hotel Kristiania Missions 46 

Hotel Savoy, Berlin 214 

Hotel Sleibot, Elsinore 38 

Hotel Stalheim, Norway 75 

Hotel Twe Stadten, The Hague 227 

Hotel Victoria, Amsterdam 223 

Imperial Apartments, St. Petersburg 155 

Imperial Mail Train, Russia 158 

Ivan the Terrible 176 

Izvostchiks 147-149-168 

Jew, Cultivated Citizen of the World 204 

Jews' Opportunity, The 206 

Jewess, Russian 202 

Jewish Synagogue, Moscow 203 

Jotunheim 61 

Jutland, to Funen and Zealand 13 



234 INDEX. 



PAGE 

Juno, 'A Viking 70 

Kilefos : 78 

King Oscar II, an Incident 134 

Kischineff, Massacres of 210 

Kremlin, The 173 

Kristiania 46 

Kristiania to Stockholm 49 

Kronborg 34 

Kronstadt, Fortress of 145 

Laera River, The 72 

Laerdalsoeren 70 

Lap Dish-wiper, A 109 

Life and Color of Swedish Capital 129-132 

Loeken Upon the Slidre Vand 63 

London, Departure 1 

London, Return to 228 

Lotef OS and Skarsf os 90 

Lubin, The Eating Room at 162 

Maarken, Island of 223 

Maarken, In a Tight Place 224 

Maidens Milking Goats 101 

Maristuen 69 

Militarism, in Germany 217 

Military Guard 160-163 

Minsk 199 

Moscow, En Route to 158-161 

Moscow, Arrive at 167 

Moscow 168 

Moscow, Our Guide in 169 

Moscow, Street Life 178 

Moscow, We Leave 195 

Mujiks, Frightful Poverty of the 197-208 

Mujiks, Hatred of Bureaucrats 187 

Naeroe Fjord 78 

Nelson, U. S. Senator 81 

Neva, Entering the River 146 

Nordsjoe Vand 110 

North Sea, Crossing the 3 

Norwegian Bride, A 119 

Notes and Comments on Norse Life 103 

Notice to Police 150 

Novo Dievitchy, Monastery 191 

Novogorod 125 

Odda, The Voyage to 87 

Odda to Horre 91 

Odnaes <. 55 

Ole Mon, Our Driver 56 



INDEX. 235 



PAGE 

Ole Mon, I Fall into Rhyme 74 

Opheims Vand 80 

Pageant of Russian Mass 182 

Palaces of St. Petersburg 154 

Passport System of Russia 136-146 

Peat Beds in Norway 114 

Peter the Great 185 

Petrovsky, Chateau 193 

Pixies and Sprites 100 

Poland and the Poles 199 

Police at St. Petersburg 149 

Problems of Russia Economic 212 

Raaben, General von 210 

Railroads — Danish 10-31 

English 1 

German 218 

Norwegian 41-81 

Russian 160-163-195 

Swedish 118 

Rand Fjord, Upon the 55 

Recruiting Farm Hands for America 113 

Red Square, Moscow 174 

Religious Feeling in Russia 180 

Rembrandt 227 

Revolution in Russia Inevitable 199 

Roldals Vand 92 

Roosevelt. Russians Admire 166 

Rubens 227 

Rundals Elv 82 

Rurik, House of 125-176 

Russians Barbarians 179 

Russian Dirt 200 

Russia, How We Entered 136 

Russia, Mediaeval and Pagan 185 

Sandvien Vand 89 

Scandinavian State, United 19-127 

Scheveningen 227 

Schools, in Norway 104 

Schools, Lack of, in Russia 156-165 

Seljestad Hotel, Our Hostess 91 

Seljestad Juvet 91 

Serfs, in Russia 206 

Ships, on North Sea 3 

Ships, jpn Gulf of Finland 138 

Skansen Park 131 

Skien .-.- 108 



236 INDEX. 



PAGE 

Skjervefos, The Roaring 83 

Skodshorn, The Legend of the 65 

Skogstad, The Night at 67 

Sleeping Car, Swedish 118 

Slidre Vand 63 

Smidal Fjord 75 

Smolensk 195 

Snow. The First 191 

Snows, Distant 60 

Sogne Fjord, On the 75 

South African Trooper, Incident 2 

Sparrow Hills 177 

Staa Vand 97 

Staavanger 88 

Stalheim to Vossvangen 81 

Stars, We are the 105 

Stockholm 129 

Stockholm and the Swede 123 

Stockholm, The Hotel at 122 

Stockholm, Life and Color of 128 

St. Peter and St. Paul, Church of 156 

St. Petersburg 148 

Stranda Vand, The 60 

Summary of Impressions 229 

Sund, The 32 

Sund, The, Crossing to Sweden, 41 

Swede and Norsk, Differentiation of 124 

Swedish Coffee House, A 133 

Swedish Sleeping Car, A 118 

Telemarken Fjords, The 108-110 

Teutonic Kinship 189 

Thier Garten, Berlin 216 

Three Continents 184 

Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen 26 

Tomlevolden 56 

Tonsaasen, Sanitorium of 57 

Trolls and Pixies 65 

Trolls and "Witches 98 

Tver, City of 163 

Tvinde Elv 81 

Twilight, the Arctic 115 

Ulivaa Vand 97 

Utro Vand 69 

Vangs Vand 81 

Vangsmjoesen Vand 60 

Valdai Hills 163 

Volga River 125-163 

Voss or Vossvangen 81 



INDEX. 237 



PAGE 

Voxli Vand 106 

"Warships, Incident of American 53 

Wealth of Churches, St. Petersburg 156-157 

Wealth of Few, Poverty of Many, Russia 148-152-157 

Wealth of Few, Russia 209 

Wedding Party, A 120 

Wein Stube, Hamburg 220 

Western Alps of Norway 88 

Winter, Preparation for 115 

Workingmen's Square 187 

Zuyder Zee 223 



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